Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross is the chief film critic of The Spectator

Restaurants | 5 February 2005

Off to the Gun, the Docklands gastropub. It’s a brisk walk from Surrey Quays station. Well, I say brisk but of course it is impossible to get anywhere briskly these days, what with the swarms of swarming immigrants swarming all over the streets and everything. They are everywhere. Everywhere! Indeed, just this morning I shook

Restaurants

Alas, half-term is over, my son is back at school, and I have the house back to myself during the day. Oh, how I miss him, or would do if I wasn’t so thrilled to get rid of the pesky old so-and-so. Oh dear, school today, I said on the first morning while pushing him

True to herself

I meet Joan Collins at Waterstone’s in Harrods, where she is signing copies of her latest novel, Misfortune’s Daughters. There she is, behind a big table and, although it pains me to say it, she is very much starting to look her age, the poor clapped-out old thing. And her fan base is not what

The triumph of Tesco

Deborah Ross joins her mother on a trip down the aisles of Britain’s favourite food chain When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury’s, the Sainsbury’s on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I must have accompanied her sometimes because I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer, turned by hand,

Green’s pleasant land

So, off to meet Sir Andrew Green, retired Foreign Office mandarin, now founder and chairman of Migration Watch, which is either an ‘independent think tank which has no links to any political party’ (Migrationwatch.co.uk) or is a ‘nasty little outfit with a distinctly unpleasant agenda’ (the Independent). It depends, I suppose, on where you are

Diary – 17 January 2004

Hurrah! At last we get the MP3 player we bought our son for Christmas to work. Four adults, working in shifts, couldn’t get it to work on Christmas Day. The same four adults, still working in shifts — very ill-tempered shifts — couldn’t get it to work on Boxing Day. The instructions, provided by Hyun