Oligarchs
It’s hard work having fun: Wives Like Us, by Plum Sykes, reviewed
A ride with friends involves dressing to the nines and stopping at a Marie Antoinette-style ‘hameau’ for sloe-gin cocktails – served by uniformed staff and filmed for Instagram
Special delivery
A youngish couple leave London and drive off excitedly to make a fresh start in more rural surroundings. They demonstrate…
Abramovich sanctioned for ‘destabilising Ukraine’
Following criticism in recent weeks that the UK government has lagged behind both the US and the EU when it…
The downfall of Russia’s oligarchs
The normal justification for sanctioning oligarchs is that doing so will cost them money, causing them to put pressure on…
The inner circle from hell
Putin’s corrupt cronies may change, but the paranoid world view they all share remains the same, says Owen Matthews
For love or money
There can’t be many programmes that bring to mind quotations from both Henry Kissinger and Boney M., but BBC2’s The…
The Russian spy who went to all the Tory parties
I first met Sergey Nalobin in 2012 at Soho House. He introduced himself, in accented English, as from the Russian…
Barometer
Peers’ peers Forty-five new peers were created. Are we alone in having an upper house of parliament made up of…
Servants of the super-rich
There is a huge industry catering to London’s foreign plutocracy
Gaudy notebook
As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything…
