London

Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold it to the banker Olaf Hambro, who was sitting at the bar, by adding the price of the restaurant to his bill. It appeared, thinly disguised, in Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals as Walton’s, in which a fictional Tory minister plots the seduction of a woman called Amanda. I like Wiltons, even if the female

A point that many people mentioned amid the horror and heroism of the attack at London Bridge was the enterprising use of a narwhal tusk taken from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall to belabour the murderous knifeman. I am surprised to find that the first person known to use narwhal in English was good old Sir Thomas Browne, in the discussion of unicorns’ horns in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Erroures, where he correctly declares that ‘those long Horns preserved as pretious rarities in many places, are but the teeth of Narhwales’. Narwhal tusks are spirally grooved, and Browne observed that the long horn preserved in his day at St

Percy and I have seen quite a few movies recently and enjoyed many of them, which is rare. But the most enjoyable was Judy, for the performance of its star, Renée Zellweger. I met Judy Garland many times when I had just arrived in Hollywood as a young starlet and I can tell you that Renée resembles her uncannily, both physically and emotionally. Judy was fragile and birdlike, but her voice was strong and magical. I watched her sing at a party given by the legendary songwriter Sammy Cahn, who accompanied her on the piano. Apart from Miss Garland’s brilliant voice, it was fascinating to watch the audience. People who

If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European–style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are? I daydream about a

An oil price surge from $60 to $72 per barrel, as happened after the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery caused a sudden 6 per cent cut to global supply, would once have been taken as a sure signal of economic troubles ahead. A 1990s study of postwar oil prices plotted against employment and other data by Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University showed that every spike in energy costs had shortly been followed by recession. The theory still held in 2008: even though the ‘Great Recession’ was attributed to financial mayhem, it came soon after a speculative oil peak of $147. But today’s barrel price seems to be

In last week’s Spectator, Martin Vander Weyer replied to a couple with a baby who had sought his advice on accepting a low offer for their cramped London flat to buy a house in commuterland. Their fear was that, if Brexit led to a property crash, they could face negative equity. Should they call the whole thing off? Emphatically not, said Martin. ‘Buying a family home is a long-term choice, rarely regretted, in which fluctuating value matters far less than whether you love the house.’ He’s right, I’m sure. But I’d like to add a further thought experiment which may reaffirm their decision. I recently heard of a different property