An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2023 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have increased the proportion of acceptances from
Shropshire is a strange county, little known by those beyond its border, and perhaps that’s part of its appeal. It not only has no coastline, but no city officially either. Phone cover is shaky and transport links sparse (at some times in the day, only one bus every two hours will leave my market town,
When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps
At long last, the day has come. After nearly two months of summer holidays, institutions beckon their children back for another school year. The television will resume its status as a post-school treat rather than an indispensable tool to fill the dead hours between events. The kitchen will no longer resemble an all-day canteen, and
Bouncers – or ‘door supervisors’ – are a pillar of the ‘British night out’. They can sneak you into an exclusive club or send your teeth skating across the pavement with their Wreck-It Ralph fists. They can take a selfie with you and call you ‘mate’ or they can hit on your sister and emasculate
Can anyone name the actors in the new Alien: Romulus movie? No, me neither. Which seems odd for such a massive franchise, but then I struggle to name a single film star under the age of about 35, and I consider myself a movie buff. As is often the case with the release of a
As I have been driving across England’s green and pleasant land visiting friends and family this summer, I discovered that the UK’s phone signal is really, really terrible. I expected poor connectivity on coastal paths in Cornwall, but everywhere I went I experienced problems: network dropouts as I tried to navigate the M1, recurrent outages
There is, reportedly, an official plan in place for the demise of Larry the Downing Street Cat, aka the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Old Larry, originally acquired by the Camerons in the early part of the coalition, has now reached the impressive age of 17, having been born in the dog days of
Benjamin Franklin famously observed that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. But there are in fact three certainties: death, taxes and bins. Of the three, bins occupy more of my thought life than my eventual demise, financial or otherwise. For a long time, bins used to be bins: receptacles for rubbish. You scraped the remains of your supper into
In January 2022, the New York Times ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, quoting Martin Amis’s daughter saying it seemed like it was. In the summer of 2023, the Guardian ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Lily-Rose Depp looks great when smoking. Last month, the Guardian again ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Dua Lipa smokes
There are quite a few ‘theories’ (what the middle classes call gossip nowadays) about why Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have sundered their union for a second time. Personally, I’m of the entirely uninformed opinion that one of the contributing factors may have been that Jennifer Lopez – like many a celeb – has her
Tamfana is just the sort of short-priced favourite that I love to take on. Yes, of course she might win tomorrow’s Sky Bet Atalanta Stakes (Sandown, 2.25 p.m.). After all, she was fourth in the Qipco 1000 Guineas at Newmarket in May and, with more luck in running, she would probably have won that day.
Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not
We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points of comparison. As a very broad generalisation, Spaniards can be divided into three political groupings. There is a Europhile elite who take their political identity from a projected European future, and almost none from their
For most parents whose teenage years pre-dated Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, few things are as terrifying as the social media use of their children. What might seem like harmless fun, such as posting memes, sharing photos, or venting frustrations, can have life-changing consequences. As a barrister who represents students, I have seen how a
It could be said that the last thing we need now is an Oasis reunion. I read somewhere that there are 56 conflicts in the world at the moment, and that doesn’t count what would surely happen if you put the Gallagher brothers in the same room. Siblings have a poor history in rock ’n’
The video game Star Wars Outlaws is to be released this week. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – so in the universe of the original, still-greatest film trilogy – and has been several years in development. According to its ‘narrative director’ Navid Khavari, ‘We didn’t just
Last week, the London restaurant St John opened reservations for a celebration of its 30th birthday. For much of September, the Smithfield restaurant will bring back its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snatched up within minutes, possibly seconds. I sat at my computer refreshing the OpenTable booking site like a monkey at a
On the evening of 10 August 1996, I found myself lost in the grounds of a stately home in Hertfordshire, and very, very drunk. Everywhere I turned, there were men, mostly young men in bucket hats. They were all raucously singing, and they too were very drunk. Everyone was drunk. It always felt like the
The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson died today. He had terminal cancer and said he expected to be dead before the year was out. In an age when such grim diagnoses are usually kept private until their morbid predictions have come to pass, it was characteristically candid of the 76-year-old Swede, even though doing
When my son was young, around 8 or 9, we lived in north London. I’d pick him up from school and take him to Lords at tea-time when the entry price for adults was £5 and children were free. We saw all kinds of less popular matches – most memorably, a young Bangladesh Test side,
Many years ago I wrote a book called Dreams and Doorways, a collection of interviews with well-known people – writers, actors, politicians, sports personalities – about their childhood. I wanted to find out how their early experiences helped to turn them into the high-achieving adults they later became. And in almost every case, some kind
In the early 1860s, the teetotal vicar Revd Henry Solly founded the very first working men’s clubs. Like so many middle-class radicals, he failed to understand the true appetites of the working classes. Where Solly had visions of ‘education’ and ‘wholesome recreation’, real working men had different ideas: they wanted booze. Real clubland is not
We’re approaching the home straight at the Proms. There are three weeks to go at the world’s greatest festival of music, and Prommers are counting down the days until the famous orchestras of Berlin, Munich and Prague reach the Royal Albert Hall. The friendly foreign invasion has become the traditional climax to eight weeks of
I don’t trust a lot of what comes out of universities’ gender studies departments – which seem to me to be more political activism dressed up in academic clothing. But I am not quite convinced, either, of the scientific rigour behind the University of Zoopla’s claim that parents are being far more generous in gifting
I was nine. It was Florence, in mid-July. My parents bravely led my younger brother and me through a day of sweaty sight-seeing. We had just been up and down the Duomo and were cooling ourselves with ice cream in an adjacent square when there was a hideous bang. At first, we thought it was
Like most fathers, I occasionally offer words of advice to my children even if they choose not to take them. Over the years, I have often told my two (now grown-up) daughters: ‘judge a person on how he or she accepts bad news’. My thinking is that pretty much anyone can be charming and generous-spirited
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to pull over in the dead of night and park the car where she did? She was on her way back with a young man from a beach party down the coast and had stopped next
The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in