An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
I’m hiding from something I used to love: the news. It’s a common tendency these days – Loyd Grossman noted it in his Spectator diary recently, calling himself a ‘nonewsnik… unable to deal with a daily diet of misery and despair’. I understand the need to escape the depressing effects of war and economic turmoil.
I recently made a programme about the British jazz pioneer Arthur Briggs. Yes, I know. Arthur who? The much-missed Jeremy Clarke told me: ‘If only he’d been called Arthur “Big-Boy” Briggs or “Honeydripper” Briggs, maybe things would have turned out differently.’ As it was, his name always suggested a painter-decorator from Edwardian Brixton rather than
In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new
Nowadays whenever an elderly celebrity dies – consider the death last month of Gene Hackman as a case in point – one of the first things that happens is that a chunky clip of them appearing on a talk show such as Wogan or Parkinson gets shared on social media. Before you know it, you’ve
Experts warn that doctors like me risk a condition known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – an emotional numbness that comes from too much caring for too long. But aren’t we all on the edge? Distant hardships are now visible as they happen, and the sense that victims are everywhere becomes vividly real. Newsreaders, documentary makers, editorialists,
The decline of Radio 3 makes a sad story. Established in 1967 to reflect the world of classical music, and high culture in general, it has become a swamp of mediocrity, peopled by presenters who might feel more comfortable on a pick ’n’ mix stall. Every day, in almost every way, it seems determined to
Any old fossil like me keen on harrumphing that popular music isn’t what it used to be will have taken a certain snarky pleasure on reading that, last year, no British act figured in the world’s top ten singles or albums for the first time since 2003. To be fair, 2003 wasn’t the best year
There was a time when the word ‘toxic’ was applied in only a handful of circumstances. There was the stuff that occasionally oozed out of a power station into the North Sea and made the fish go funny. Or there was the substance that Christopher Lloyd would stick in the gull-wing doored DeLorean to make
What began in 1998 with Tony Blair standing in the Globe Theatre to announce a new celebration of books has morphed into something much bigger. Along with Black History Month or World History Day, tomorrow’s World Book Day is now a full member of the woke calendar. This calendar has grown – largely thanks to
The BBC celebrated one of its own on Monday night. Armando Iannucci was treated to a fawning retrospective by Alan Yentob, and it opened with a crass piece of TV trickery. ‘Armando Iannucci is not an easy man to pin down,’ said Yentob, as if his quarry were a master criminal or an international terrorist.
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