An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Here is a great festive pub quiz question for you. Which film was the song ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ written for? It’s likely, particularly if you’re below a certain age, that your first reaction will be surprise that it was written for a film in the first place. That’s a reflection not so
Something very strange is happening in Britain at the moment. Look at the economy. Things aren’t really too bad: for a start it’s actually growing, if only a little. At the same time, inflation is falling. Real incomes are on the rise too – with earnings going up 4.4 per cent in the year to October, while
It feels, pleasingly, like a scene from a cerebral James Bond film, or perhaps an episode of Slow Horses. I am in a shadowy corner of a plush, buzzy Soho members’ bar. A mild December twilight is falling over London. Across the table from me sits an old acquaintance, a senior English barrister, greying, quietly handsome, in
At some point during this Advent season and the coming of Christmas, you will log on to your computer, and you will see somebody smugly opining that ‘actually Christmas is a pagan festival’. This person will not know anything about pagans, bar some fuzzy ideas about equinoxes (always with the equinoxes) and sacrifice. The reasons
Bring back brothels! It’s not your typical political slogan, but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has launched a campaign to reopen and regulate France’s brothels for the benefit of sex workers. In an interview last week Jean-Philippe Tanguy, one of Le Pen’s senior MPs, said his party would table a bill to reopen the brothels
Whenever I hear the phrase ‘holiday of a lifetime’, I cringe. Same with ‘dream job’. You know they’re both going to disappoint. How can they not? Expectations have been allowed to build and build, way beyond the ability of reality to deliver. And even if your new job does make you happy for a while,
Sometime in mid-October, my husband and I begin our annual deliberation: should we host a village Christmas drinks party? The conversation is almost invariably instigated by my charming husband who, mindful of all the invitations we have shamefully yet to reciprocate, feels that we ‘ought to do it this year, at least’. Almost invariably, I am the voice of dissent. The arguments I give against are motivated
Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we are all visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. At this time of year, people and events that have gone before feel closer at hand – both the personal and the historical. One of the main ways we experience this is through our tradition of Christmas carols. A recent YouGov survey
‘Dearly beloved friends and family, well, what a year it’s been! Where to start?! The big event for us – aside from nurturing our preternaturally gifted children and enjoying multiple holidays in exotic locations – was the “K” for Rupert in the King’s Birthday Honours list. Mingling with the Beckhams at Buck House after the
David Lammy’s proposal to do away with jury trials for all but the most serious offences has a consequence which hasn’t so far been aired in national debate. It could deprive me of the chance to bang up some evildoer. Whoops! Saying that probably won’t help me realise my ambition. I think it was the
Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A
Once upon a time, post was delivered by a postman or postwoman. Over the past two centuries, this quaint initiative augmented a sense of community and invested early mornings with at least fleeting human contact. These days, decades after the slow demise of letter writing, a postman is now a rather recherché figure and, thanks
It’s that time of year when the cards landing on the doormat compete for the title of most fatuous. Will it be a reindeer spouting an obscenity, or a painterly robin perched on a frosted gatepost in snowy landscapes? Might it be a sanitised cartoon of a coach and four outside a snow-encrusted inn, bright
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‘Labour is now the party of welfare, not work’ argues Michael Simmons in the Spectator’s cover article this week. The question ‘why should I bother with work?’ is becoming harder to answer, following last week’s Budget which could come to define this Labour government. A smaller and smaller cohort of people are being asked to shoulder the
Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’ – we’ll have a good laugh about these obsolete artefacts of the not-so-distant past. But last year when my ten-year-old asked about ‘Immigrant Song’, which he’d heard on the soundtrack to a Marvel movie, and
It is estimated that, sometime in the past few months, the content on the internet produced by AI finally overtook content produced by the human mind. In other words, if you go online these days – from YouTube to X, from Facebook to TikTok to can-that-really-be-a-fetish.com – you are more likely than not to be
I was driving my daughter to school recently when we tuned into Heart Breakfast. A caller was attempting to answer five Christmas-related questions that, if successful, would mean that the countdown to the big day could ‘officially begin’. They weren’t hard but when the questions were answered correctly, there was pandemonium in the Heart studios.
Norman Lebrecht, who attends concerts as frequently as falcons swoop over St John’s Wood, has declared 2025 to be a terrible year for music. We are at the mercy of political activists, he thinks, and he has a point. Zealots, particularly those who pursue pro-Palestinian causes, are relentless troublemakers for whom an undefended concert hall
If Christmas is a time for giving then it seems the message isn’t getting through to nearly enough office managers. For the umpteenth year running, I’m getting the annual stream of resigned-sounding complaints from friends who have office-based careers. Office life has its perks, of course; unlike my mostly-bed-and-airport-based freelance life, you actually know what
In search of coffee on my way to work the other day, I stopped short mid-way into a branch of a popular coffee shop when I noticed the digital ordering screens. Nothing will lose my business faster than being asked to queue twice and do the work of someone else for something simple. But these
Winston Churchill and his arch enemy Adolf Hitler didn’t have a lot in common, but one passion they did share was painting: both the heroic wartime prime minister and the genocidal Nazi dictator were keen amateur artists. While auction houses are reluctant to handle or sell Hitler’s landscapes for obvious reasons, Churchill’s pictures have vastly
Last week a Radiohead-head friend offered me a ticket for the last of their run of shows at London’s O2 Arena. The poor, deluded fool had paid several hundred quid and was looking to recoup. I politely declined, saying I would rather suffer from decompression sickness. My friend was not amused – but then that’s
There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school. It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At
When a survey of 10,000 teachers revealed this month that Britain’s primary school pupils are increasingly relying on Americanisms (the Times front page declared ‘Trash-talking children are sounding like Americans’) I realised immediately what we needed. Rex Harrison. And if not Rex Harrison himself, then a dose of arguably his greatest role – that of
When I was growing up, it was generally accepted (unless you were a football hooligan) that, however much you disagreed with someone, they were entitled to their opinion. You listened, occasionally interjecting, and then made your case – sometimes forcefully. In the end, you might agree to disagree, but you didn’t harbour any enmity. These
Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically
The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing
In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on.
I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the
