The tragic misfortune of Mike Lynch
Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch (missing, feared dead, as we went to press), once a decade or…
What’s the right way to voyage?
My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out next week, a bit late for my birthday.…
I was wrong about staycations
I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway.…
Dear Mary: how do I hide my pregnancy from my boozy friends?
Q. We love having friends to stay at our house in Cornwall. One particular guest has the habit of arriving…
The simple beauty of the Hundred
Time to come clean: I really like the Hundred. This is the sort of view that normally makes people look…
A slice of Paris in Crouch End: Bistro Aix reviewed
There is a wonderful cognitive dissonance to Bistro Aix. It thinks it is in Paris but it is really in…
2668: Obit VII
Clockwise round the grid from the square between 3 and 4 run the names (forename and surname) of four eminent…
Shattering the myth of the ‘glass ceiling’
What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In…
A familiar OE-led balls-up: Rory Stewart’s The Long History of Ignorance reviewed
In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know:…
The fun of the Shergar Cup
Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at…
Britain’s youngest summer opera festival is seriously impressive
Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of…
Keep fun out of funerals
There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’…
How did we ever come to accept the inhumane excesses of capitalism?
What was neoliberalism? In its most recent iteration, we think of the market seeping into every minute corner of human…
The myth of Britain’s fleeing non-doms
According to popular imagination, the skies over Britain have been full these past few months of fleets of private jets…
The best film you won’t go and see this week: Widow Clicquot reviewed
August is known as ‘dump month’. It’s when the most forgettable films are released on the grounds that people don’t…
An American’s love letter to Britain
My wife and I relocated to the UK a few months ago after spending the past 37 years in the…
The cast mistake screaming for comedy: Cockfosters, at Turbine Theatre, reviewed
The Turbine Theatre is a newish venue beneath the railway arches of Grosvenor Bridge in Battersea. The comfy auditorium is…
Should radical lesbians dictate what we eat?
Are radical lesbians dictating what we can and cannot eat, through the offices of this very magazine? It would certainly…
The dark truth about Hollywood assistants
Anew stop has been added to the map of Movie Star Homes and Crime Scenes, on sale at LAX airport:…
Can Kamala Harris bluff her way to the White House?
Chicago ‘There are no disasters,’ said Boris Johnson, who was born in America. ‘Only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh…
The depraved world of chess cheats
Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from Russia, supposedly tried to poison a younger rival at the Dagestan Chess Championship…
Farage’s next move in his plan to destroy the Tories
On Tuesday afternoon, a familiar figure pulled up at a Westminster café to plot the Tories’ downfall. Nigel Farage beamed…
