An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
I have already put up two horses ante-post for today’s Coral Welsh Grand National at Chepstow (2.50 p.m.) and with mixed results. Monbeg Genius, tipped each way at 20-1 last month, has been steadily backed ever since and, until this morning, was vying for favouritism. Manofthepeople, tipped each way a week ago at 50-1, has
There comes a time right after the new year when the retail sector decides it’s done with fairy lights and sparkles. Out goes the party food, the bao buns with Santa hats, the mixed platters of prosciutto and cheese, the gift sets of flavoured olive oil and the festive cheeseboards. On the discount rails there
Anyone without time to read an author’s long works (most of us these days) might want to consider simply going to the top of the tree and reading their table-talk instead. Conversations with Writers, a series of books from the University of Mississippi Press, has hundreds of titles featuring collected interviews with different authors, from
Rod Liddle The angels in Jim Crace’s Eden are tetchy and petty authoritarians, apart from one who can’t fly properly. This dissertation on freedom and mortality is rather wonderful – published two years ago but I caught up with it only this year. The best non-fiction book of the year is David Goodhart’s The Care
On 2 October 1814, a grand feast was held at the Hofburg imperial palace during the Congress of Vienna. Famed French chef Marie-Antoine Carême was charged with cooking and didn’t disappoint. But when it came to the cheese course, a lively argument broke out among the assembled statesmen, each advocating for the superiority of their
The 1990s comedy series the Royle Family includes a perfect scene in which Barbara says she won’t bother getting a turkey the following year, as nobody actually likes it. Everyone looks horrified. But she’s right. Advocaat, mince pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake (especially the marzipan) cranberry sauce, and balls of sausage meat made into stuffing
Come on in, take a seat, drink deep by the roaring hearth and don’t worry about the time – there’s bound to be a lock-in. Such is the Christmas Eve pub scenario of our fantasies. It’s been a long trek back to our home town, most likely thanks to a ‘cow on the line’ or
Those who still make a habit of the Sunday roast are faced with a challenge come Christmas: how to make sure the big meal doesn’t disappoint. What if the turkey is a let-down given everyone so loves the topside of beef? It would take a real Grinch to sniff at the festive spread – we
Dual-purpose trainer Hughie Morrison usually has one of two jumping stars to supplement his talented flat horses at his Berkshire stables. In recent years, Not So Sleepy has been the flag-bearer for the yard over the winter months but he was retired, aged 12, after winning on the level at Newbury in September. If Morrison
Perhaps because more and more BBC radio programmes are being broadcast from Salford, the whole of Britain is getting used to hearing multiple uses of the expression ‘I was sat’ or ‘I was stood’. Often, those words come at the very beginning of programmes, spoken by the presenter to set the scene. ‘I’m sat in
For a spell in the late 1970s there were two pop groups which dominated the UK singles charts – both, coincidentally, vocal quartets from continental northern Europe. But while one, Abba, have since become a billion-pound industry with an apparently permanent hologram-shaped presence on the London concert scene, their then rivals for pop supremacy, Boney
It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7. Who can afford this stuff? If you have the time to make your own stock then all credit to you. But if not, the concentrated stock in little cubes or tubs is
James Joyce called Guinness ‘the wine of Ireland’. Now it feels a bit more like the Coca-Cola of alcohol – as much brash branding as beer. Once, it merely had an ugly logo and the rowdy promise of Emerald Isle hedonism which – I confess I have often thought – is crafted to appeal to
Were there arguments? Undoubtedly. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, it was a dead cert that Great Aunt Mary would prefer BBC Two’s festive celebration from Westminster Cathedral (complete with the puberty-defying nearly-15-year-old Anglesey treble Aled Jones) to Kenny Everett’s reworking of A Christmas Carol on BBC One (louche, anarchic and probably regrettable, with its jokes about
In the pantheon of memorable pop songs, Chappell Roan’s ‘HOT TO GO!’ is right up there. A breezy, unpretentious electropop effort, it has quite a forgettable verse, but that soon gives way to a shouty, cheerleader-style chorus in which Ms Roan repeatedly informs us that she is, indeed, ‘hot to go’. Somehow I recently heard
There was a magnificent chorus of spluttering and gasping in literary London last week when it was announced that the actress Sarah Jessica Parker was to be one of the judges for the Booker Prize. As one critic remarked, ‘Just because she plays a writer of sorts in Sex and the City doesn’t mean that
The homes of famous writers are disappointing. Often, you see the famous desk, and that’s about it. There are exceptions: for example, Pushkin’s home in St Petersburg is interesting because they have the blooded waistcoat he wore during his fateful duel. Hemingway’s house in Cuba is intriguing because it is so macho – pistol, rifles,
GABORIOT was my fancy for last weekend’s Boylesports Becher Chase until the weather intervened and the Aintree meeting was cancelled. Joint trainers Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero have, however, wasted little time in finding their eight-year-old gelding a new target in the form of a big handicap tomorrow. I am going to stay loyal to
‘It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.’ (A Christmas Carol.) And there is exactly the problem with festive fowl. In most cases, we get turkey. And usually we get it far too big, which leads to
This week, in honour of its 70th anniversary, the Feathers Association released photos of youths aged 14 to 16 at its annual Christmas charity ball. Among them, a young David Cameron is pictured poutingly draped around Laura Stanley. The Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, stands with his black tie askew, laughing at the camera with
Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty found it crushing to realise that he was never going to be given the part of Hamlet – ‘I shall never play the Dane!’ – for many of us, an equal disappointment is realising, sooner or later, that we’ll probably die uninvited onto Desert Island Discs. This programme has run
For as long as we’ve been serving food, we’ve been unable to resist a bit of culinary deception. Making one thing look like another thing – especially if it makes a sweet thing look savoury or vice versa – seems to have universal comedic value. There’s something Willy Wonka-ish about the visual wrong-footing, the surprise
This has been the most fascinating political year I can remember. I have even found myself dreaming about politics – and neither the excitements nor the perils are likely to end any time soon. So it might seem self-indulgent to tear one’s attention away from grog. But we all need distraction, even in the spirit
Back to the past: it’s safer there. There is a themed restaurant dedicated to George VI of all people, near Berkeley Square – a sort of Rainforest Café for monarchists who won’t sink to the Tiltyard Café at Hampton Court. I was looking for a restaurant my husband might like – Brexit, meat, maps of
Recently, scientists were baffled by the discovery that ice cream is a superfood. Yes, that’s right, people who eat ice cream tend to be healthier than those who don’t. A lot healthier. It’s ‘nutrition science’s most preposterous result’, according to the Atlantic. In fact, there’s nothing preposterous about it, if you actually know anything about
It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and greediest men on the planet, wanting a massive extra bung to pitch up for the Ryder Cup and, equally noisome, Bill Sweeney, chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, paying himself £1.1 million while announcing
A young woman called Lily Phillips, known to certain users of the internet, has recently spoken about a cunning stunt she performed earlier this year. She had sex with 101 men in a single day. As I see it, there are three possible responses to this story. Or maybe four (phwoar!). The first is to
As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the
It gets somewhat forgotten, Osaka. On the bamboo-and-tatami trail of Japanese sites, this ancient port, fort and conurbation at the very heart of Japan commonly misses out on foreign visitors: as everyone rushes from Tokyo to Kyoto, from sacred Mount Fuji to ancient Nara to haunted Hiroshima. For most overseas tourists, Osaka is just a