Life

High life

Spanish style

Madrid This is the sultriest city in Europe and, along with Paris and Rome, the most romantic capital of the old continent. When visiting Madrid there is only one place to stay, the Hotel Ritz, right in the heart of the city, opposite the Prado. There is a bucolic air about the Ritz, with the

Low life

Waiting for Mr Kurtz

The yellow plastic tables on the terrace outside the ferry-terminal bar faced directly into the afternoon sun. It was the last week of September and surprisingly hot. We’d been over to Roscoff for the day, from Plymouth, just for something to do, and we’d been uncomfortably hot all day, traipsing round in our sports anoraks

More from life

Sven’s last stand

A revitalised Scottish team will cause a heck of a bonny din at splintery auld Hampden this afternoon — olde tyme optimism. Ditto Northern Ireland at venerable Windsor Park. Neither are likely to qualify for next year’s World Cup finals, but England are, yet the preliminaries to their match at Old Trafford against Austria have

Your Problems Solved | 8 October 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am the only child of parents in their seventies who are not super-rich but who do own a house in Dorset worth more than the £265,000 one is allowed to inherit before the 40 per cent inheritance tax comes into play. Ideally they would hand ownership of the house over to