London
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
Hot air
Next Tuesday, London’s Ulez scheme will be expanded. A new network of cameras filming the traffic movements of millions of…
Another beautiful layer of bureaucracy
‘Only boring people get bored’ is what we were all told as children. What we were not warned about was…
High life
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
Alice in gastroland
The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage,…
Fine diner
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior…
London’s number is up
Some years ago, an Australian neurologist was in the habit of walking barefoot across his lawn. This being Australia, the…
Hot cakes
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in…
A personal best
In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal…
My lunch with Liz
Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the…
Civilisation in a sausage
When the Tory party set itself on fire last week a restaurateur told me: ‘Don’t worry, Tanya, we’ll still be…
Road to hell
The blight of the 20mph speed limit
