An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
In my day job, I work with children. Well, OK, they’re in their twenties, but when they ask me who my favourite musician of all time is, and I say Madonna, they usually look blank. That funny-looking woman who had a few hits in the 1980s? Meh, what about Taylor Swift? Madonna may not have
I doubt many people reading this have much sympathy for Prince Harry, but spare a thought for those who have become the collateral damage in all the Harry hate: his fellow redheads. Our precarious fortunes seem to be pegged to the popularity of the most famous male member of our kind. When Harry was loved,
The Volkswagen ID Buzz is a pretty car, though so innocent-seeming you would forgive it anything. It succeeds the equally pretty T2 campervan, the Betty Boop of 1950s vehicles. The T2 was so convincing – cars, like everything, vary in charisma – it is one of the most famous vehicles in the world, so much
At first glance, the substantial yellow house on the turn of the country road could be a Trollopean rectory, one long sold off to a lawyer or boardroom executive. This is Castle House in north Essex – set in the flat, luscious landscape made famous by John Constable – which was for 40 years the
Like everyone else I’m enjoying the boozy antics of Man City’s Jack Grealish. He’s spent the last few days partying following Man City’s victory in the Champions League, behaving exactly how a 27-year-old who earns £15 million a year should behave. He’s having a ball and who can blame him? But there’s a difference between
I’m writing this with headphones in, sitting at my desk on Old Queen Street. Please don’t tell Debrett’s. Apparently listening to headphones in the office is a huge faux pas, akin to cutting camembert with a fish knife. The company’s etiquette adviser, Liz Wyse, told the Times: ‘If you work in an open-plan office where
One of the great pluses of electric cars is that they are so quiet. The driver’s seat is a peaceful place to be, although safety regulations dictate they must emit artificial noise to alert pedestrians to their presence when travelling below certain speeds. Now that steps have been taken to prevent the visually impaired from
Earlier this week, Apple unveiled their latest product: the Vision Pro ultra-premium mixed reality headset. It’s sleek, advanced and luxurious, powered by Apple’s class-leading M2 and R1 chips, running their new VisionOS operating system, and built with a blend of glass, aluminium and plush fabric. Seven years after that messy launch, the Watch division made
I was just arriving at El Vino on Fleet Street for a leaving do when my phone rang. It was my wife, sounding frantic. ‘Where’s that box?’ ‘What box?’ ‘The box that was outside our bedroom door.’ I didn’t just do the bins effectively, I did them with grace. I did the bins, I thought, in
There was much to celebrate last year on the architecture front – the end of the pandemic brought the opening of long-delayed projects ranging from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Hollywood to the Taipei Performing Arts Centre in Taiwan. But there was one construction project that stood head and shoulders above the rest in size
If you’d read the advance coverage of this week’s Chelsea Flower Show, you might be forgiven for thinking the entire event had been choked by bindweed, dandelions and nettles. Yes, there are some show gardens that use plants commonly called ‘weeds’ as part of their designs, but the show gardens this year really aren’t radically
When imagining a monarch’s wardrobe, what comes to mind? With the late Queen, it was bold-coloured dresses (as she famously said, ‘I have to be seen to be believed’), elaborate hats, silk headscarves and those black Launer handbags. Our new King is no less a style icon. For him it’s well-tailored double-breasted suits from Anderson
Ian Fleming once said that a gentleman’s choice of timepiece said as much about him as his Savile Row suit. The latter part of that evaluation seems anachronistic now – after all, who apart from Jacob Rees-Mogg wears Savile Row suits with any regularity these days? But the idea of the watch as indicator of
While protestors failed to overshadow the coronation, someone else did manage to steal the limelight. Penny Mordaunt, former Conservative leadership hopeful and Lord President of the Council, emerged victorious from today’s service. It was Mordaunt, not the King, who captured the imagination of some viewers at home and abroad. Arriving at Westminster Abbey in a
My British fiancé, Richard, came with a dowry. Lest anyone think I married money, china and sterling-for-eight, let me set you straight: Richard’s dowry was a huge, wooden salad bowl, a carpet sweeper and a stool. My dowry had the china, sterling and a vacuum cleaner. No stools were made for Charles III’s coronation,
Lots of things seem to get described as ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences nowadays, but for many of us the coronation really will be just that. So, how to make the most of the historic long weekend? Clock off from work at a reasonable time on Friday and while getting dressed into your glad rags
The Met Gala, in case you didn’t you know, is held in New York on the first Monday of May every year to raise money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The theme of last night’s event was ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’. Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who chooses the theme, has come
I can remember exactly where I was when I first fell in love with Tetris. It was the student bar of Oriel College, Oxford, in the very early 1990s. I’d gone to visit my friend Ed, and we bunged a few 10ps into the sticky arcade cabinet in the corner of the bar while we chatted and drank our
What’s your go-to speed on the motorway? Do you snuffle along at 70, slowing down the lorries in your Rover 75? More likely you cruise the middle lane on the cusp of 80 – just on the wrong side of the law, plus 10 per cent and then some. That’s what I like to do,
In the darkest depths of lockdown, trapped in a subterranean flat in South London, I struck upon an idea: I would buy a bike. I’d had one at university and remembered enjoying the meditative effects of gliding through parks and down streets. It would mean something to do other than fighting over who got to
Do you think the luxury soap-maker Aesop would have been valued at £2 billion pre-pandemic? I don’t. Sure, the botanical Aussie cosmetics brand, famously seen in the prettiest restaurants and lining the bathrooms of the fashionable, has been valuable for some time, but ‘hands, face, space’ propelled its growing stardom into a multi-billion pound lather.
Some years ago, I was despatched to Las Vegas to learn how to be a chauffeur. The Wynn hotel had purchased a fleet of Rolls-Royces, and their Aloysius Parkers were being taught how to drive the Rolls-Royce way – i.e. a cut above your Lincoln Town Car etiquette. ‘The umbrella can be used both defensively
The fashion designer and icon Mary Quant has died at the age of 93. Brigid Keenan wrote the following piece in 2019. It is almost impossible to explain to today’s readers why Mary Quant (and the other Young Designers, as they became known) had such a huge impact. Over the half-century since, there have been
This morning, like so many other mornings, I spent at least half an hour, over coffee, staring at online pictures of pipes. This does not make me an aspiring plumber, or someone with a fetish for u-bends or draining units. I’m talking about briar pipes, tobacco pipes: for though I know I should quit the
Our collective Man Card is on the verge of being rescinded. The number of lonely, single men is rising – and testosterone levels are falling. The causes of our macho decline are myriad, but a quick fix is at hand: it’s time to bring back sideburns. It seems these days that the only facial hair options
Almost 50 years ago, I was fashion editor of the Sunday Times and a man in his mid-twenties by the name of Michael Roberts was a junior editor. Born in Buckinghamshire in 1947 to an English mother and a father from St Lucia, he was handsome and stood very tall and straight. Even so, when he
The new Aston Martin Vantage is shorter and hotter than the DB11: a smaller, truer sportscar, though slightly less elegant. ‘Gentlemanly’ is what the copywriter calls the DB11, but this is a ‘hunter’ and ‘predatory’. Ferraris, meanwhile, are a little too hot for me – though I accept that they are sublime, if Ferraris are
At the start of this month, the modish kitchen appliance brand Sub-Zero & Wolf proudly announced the launch of its Classic French Door fridge-freezer. This beast of a machine, featuring Nasa-inspired air purification technology and an automatic ice-maker complete with ‘party mode’, will set you back £23,868 – or the best part of a year’s salary for the
Of all the accessories one might expect a celebrity with millions in the bank and army of stylists at their disposal to choose, a bargain watch is not the most obvious. Yet Casio timepieces – some of which sell for little as £10, and most of which cost under £50 – appear to have become
