An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The death of the painter Jack Vettriano at the age of 73 is sure to delight at least one art critic: the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Jones has consistently attacked the creator of The Singing Butler, Britain’s best-selling single image, as ‘brainless’ and ‘not even an artist’. He derided his work as ‘a crass male fantasy
The news that the Imperial War Museum is closing Lord Ashcroft’s Victoria Cross and George Cross gallery is sadly not a great surprise. It’s the latest act in the ‘wokeification’ of this once outstanding museum. Writing in the Daily Telegraph last week, Lord Ashcroft said that the IWM didn’t even have the ‘courtesy to inform’
Chiselled out of stone in around the 1st century AD, the scene in this image gives a powerful snapshot of the excitement of gladiatorial combat. In this carving found in Turkey – once a key part of the Roman empire – the opponents face each other head-on, with a look of grim determination. From behind their curved
The comic writer George Mikes, who died nearly 40 years ago, knew he had made it when he received a fan letter one day from Albert Einstein. Mikes, the scientist said to him, was blessed with ‘radiant humour… Everyone must laugh with you, even those who are hit with your little arrows.’ Chief among Mikes’s
Hardly a month goes by without a report of guerrilla rewilders at work. Lynx released in the Cairngorms, wild boar on Dartmoor, beavers everywhere and, no doubt, before long, wolves and bears – if neo-Rousseauist guerrillas can find a ready supply and achieve it without being bitten. Usually, these illegal releases of formerly indigenous-but-no-longer-native animals
More than one in five people in the UK is out of work at the moment. As lockdowns lifted, many people developed anxiety and depression – most of which can be alleviated by companionship, routine and having your own cash. What I can’t understand is young, fit people not working. From the age of 13,
When I was at Edinburgh University a decade ago, a girl with a thick Surrey accent stopped me as I walked back to my room in halls. ‘Rah, have you been to the reeling society?’ she asked. ‘What makes you think that?’ I replied. ‘You’ve acquired a slight limp.’ ‘It’s the cerebral palsy, luv.’ They’re
He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into space: the first to board the International Space Station, the first to carry out a space walk. Major Tim Peake even ran a marathon while in orbit. So why do I wince every time I hear his name? When I was growing up, shortly after the
There is a certain comic archetype that is particularly British. The likes of Pooter, Mainwaring, Hancock, Fawlty and Brent are in a tradition – going back to Falstaff, perhaps further – of hopelessly optimistic yet socially oblivious dreamers. One such character is John Shuttleworth, created and played by Graham Fellows. For the uninitiated, John Shuttleworth
It’s open season on cats. Last month the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission (SAWC) floated the idea of ‘compulsory containment of cats in vulnerable areas’, and added that in some new housing developments felines could be banned altogether. The report prompted a deluge of what I am going to call catphobia, for no other reason than
Dimly lit bars are great first-date venues for most people: the seductive ambience, the candles, the gentle clink of a martini shaker. But they couldn’t be worse for a visually impaired dater such as myself. I was born with ocular albinism and nystagmus, which renders me blind in one eye and severely partially sighted in
Do kids still have hobbies? Maybe hobbies isn’t quite the right word. What I mean is a passionate interest in something fairly adult, something more than playing with toys. For example, a child might get precociously into theatre or birdwatching or medieval history and have a first taste of adult enthusiasm for something. I was
Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh
As we approach with anticipation or dread 14 February, the day we traditionally celebrate love and all things amorous, a certain demographic will instead be observing a rather less passionate and altogether more bland occasion: ‘Palentine’s Day’. Commemorated on 13 February, this is apparently the date upon which to honour platonic friendships instead of romantic
I have just finished writing a book and am moping about the house at a loose end. The conventional advice to anyone thinking about writing a book is: don’t. Unless you’re one of the 1 per cent of authors who make 99 per cent of the money, it’s a mug’s game as far as making
‘Centrist dad’, a term that has been with us for a decade or so, has never exactly been a compliment. In 2017, even Tony Blair – then still pretty close to being political toxic waste – disavowed the label, declaring: ‘I’m not a centrist dad.’ In that same year a chap named Matt Zarb-Cousin, a
Antique shops are melancholy places. The deep leather armchairs, Anglepoise lamps and bamboo bookshelves. They ask questions: who sat, worked or read using these? Banal questions, possibly, but life is generally banal, and no less poignant for that. It’s not an unpleasant sort of melancholia. Quite the opposite. If I had to create a word
As a girl, and later a woman, prone to barbs and punchy elocutions, I have encountered a great many repercussions for my words. My re-education began in primary school when the mother of a classmate angrily rang my mum to tell her that I had said this or that outrageous thing to her daughter. (A
In Dad’s Army, Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, fought in six campaigns, from the Sudan in 1884 to the second world war. Well, my great-grandfather, Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, can beat that. He joined up at 18 in 1859 and stayed in the army for 65 years, until his death at 83, 100
In a small, dark room in the depths of Banshee Labyrinth, a gothic-looking venue just off Cowgate in Edinburgh, 11 people cheer and clap as I thank them profusely for spending the past hour with me. My backdrop is a red and white no-smoking sign and two coffin-shaped blackboards with drinks offers scrawled on them
Anyone of a certain age is aware of the urban legend that links Marianne Faithfull, a Mars bar and Mick Jagger. But Marianne’s death yesterday at the grand age of 78 (given her lifestyle, how did she get that old?) really does remove one of the last living links with the golden age of rock
The suggestion that the Prince Charles cinema in London’s West End could be closed down was the least surprising news of the week. This sort of thing, fuelled by soaring property values, has been happening in Soho and its periphery for three decades now and shows no sign of relenting. The Prince Charles isn’t strictly
There are multiple reasons to be fascinated by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that debuted last week, knocking Donald Trump off the headlines and $1 trillion off the US stock market. For a start, it represents yet another remarkable leap forward in the race to artificial general intelligence – which looks likely to arrive this
At the start of the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s protest-singer mentor Pete Seeger implores him not to swap his trusty acoustic for a newfangled Fender Stratocaster electric. ‘A good song can get the job done without the frills,’ says Seeger – who, for all his progressive views, wasn’t very hip to
I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV programmes, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant,
How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert
It’s only January, but I’m ready to declare my 2025 word of the year. Creep. It’s everywhere (though true to form you may not immediately spot it). The online world is no longer merely parallel. It intersects, subsumes and fuels our real world. Siri, Alexa et al lurk. The internet, email and, above all, apps
When Herbert von Karajan was at his celestial height in the 1960s, juggling conducting duties at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, his musicians liked to tell a joke. ‘Karajan gets in a taxi, and the driver asks, “Where to?” Karajan says, “It doesn’t matter, they want me everywhere.”’ Not
Shortly before midnight on the evening of Friday 24 January 1975, at Cologne Opera House on the banks of the Rhine, a wiry 29-year-old from Pennsylvania walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of 1,400 people and began to play the piano, alone. The 50th anniversary of what followed is being celebrated with
