London
The deep sorrow of losing a sibling
My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse:…
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.…
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…
A French restaurant Glastonbury would be proud to host: Café Lapérouse reviewed
I am working my way around the restaurants of the Old War Office (OWO), now an acronym and Raffles hotel…
Jeremy King has done it again: The Park, reviewed
The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of…
How Margaret Thatcher could have saved London’s skyline
If, like Prince Albert, the then Prince Charles had been appointed head of the Royal Fine Art Commission, we might have been spared many architectural outrages
More Mr Pooter than Joe Orton: George Lucas’s gay life in London
Beginning in 1948, Lucas kept a diary chronicling 60 highly promiscuous years – though ‘my great desideratum has always been sympathy and affection’
Women don’t want women-only clubs
In my experience, men offer this infuriating comeback when challenged about the continuing exclusion of women from clubs such as…
The new status symbol of the super rich: headlice
To help out friends, I sometimes collect a boy from his primary school near Sloane Square. This part of London…
The heady, hedonistic summer in which I became a life-long foreigner
Rome I have spent almost all my adult life as a foreigner. When I graduated from Oxford I faced a…
How the Georgians invented nightlife
Dan Hitchens on the Georgian obsession with lavish light shows and nocturnal adventures
‘Weaponising Jewish people is wrong’: Sadiq Khan on anti-Semitism, Ulez and the upcoming electoral battle
Sadiq Khan on anti-Semitism, Ulez and the upcoming electoral battle
Is Ulez too fashionable to fact check?
Next Tuesday, London’s Ulez scheme will be expanded. A new network of cameras filming the traffic movements of millions of…
Hell is the Ulez hotline
‘Only boring people get bored’ is what we were all told as children. What we were not warned about was…
In praise of Londoners
Southampton, Long Island ‘Why, oh why, do the wrong people travel?’ sang Noël Coward back in the early 1960s. Lucky…
Could Derbyshire survive on its own?
Since at least the beginning of this century there has been a mood abroad – cultural as well as political…
The root of the problem
The novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo is attracted by the freedom a New York job promises, but misses the young daughter she has left behind in London
A themed restaurant done right: The Alice, Oxford, reviewed
The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage,…
What Soho House has got right: Electric Diner reviewed
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior…
The Conservative case for remote working
Some years ago, an Australian neurologist was in the habit of walking barefoot across his lawn. This being Australia, the…
