Culture
Riot act
Where better for Spectator Life to meet Max Irons, star of The Riot Club, Lone Scherfig’s film loosely based on…
Buller Bull
Spoiler alert: the first five minutes of The Riot Club are so dreadful that you’ll wish you hadn’t gone. It…
Pattern Recognition
I am lucky enough to work at House & Garden, where photographs of houses much more sophisticated than my own…
Between two worlds
For anyone in the art world, one of the places to be this month is Istanbul, which is fast becoming…
Don’t reach for the stars
‘Meeting Kylie at her intimate gig,’ runs the Mastercard ad. ‘Priceless.’ Wrong: vaguely unfulfilling. And that’s at best. At worst…
Full house
At the heart of a turreted manor in Buckinghamshire, the young man sits alone, concentrating on building his house of cards.…
Belle Fleur
Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s first glimpse of her character in the British film Belle came on a postcard. It was of a…
Peaches and me
One of the first things I told her was that I knew very little of her back story, and Peaches…
Export strength
‘Nightclubs, if they are run badly, can attract the worst of the worst,’ says Guy Pelly sagely. Pelly became famous…
Neighbourhood Watch
The terrific 1958 Peter Sellers skit ‘Balham, Gateway to the South’, written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, has lost…
Masters at work
The apprentice is back! No, not another series of the transatlantic TV show starring blowhards with bad hair, but the…
Arcade games
Art dealer John Martin folds up his bicycle and puts it behind the desk of his Mayfair gallery, a haven…
The Wish List
Clockwise from left: Luminor Submersible 1950 3 Days Automatic Titanio, £6,800, Panerai; Grande Seconde SW Acier, £11,600, Jaquet Droz; Annual…
Angel blue
Angel Blue has got a sensational story. A lot of the people we feature on the South Bank Show are not…
Man out of time
It’s probably my age, but weird things seem to be happening to time. For one thing, it seems to be…
Any colour you like
Without bad taste there would be no good taste, so thank God we don’t all like the same thing. The…
175 years of watchmaking expertise
A watch isn’t necessarily something that you think of as being a feat of engineering. But there is far more…
Dancing on the edge
Mikhail Baryshnikov is annoyed with himself. When we meet, it’s at the world premiere of his play The Old Woman,…
Hot Scots
Rose Leslie Though the housemaid she played in Downton Abbey left to become a secretary during the first series, Rose…
‘Sometimes I think I must have done a deal with the devil’
In Page Eight, the sophisticated 2011 spy drama written by David Hare, the MI5 agent Johnny Worricker — played by…
Life cycle
‘As a heads up,’ says Sir Chris Hoy’s PR lady in that breezy-yet-bossy voice that is public relations, ‘Chris doesn’t…
Bore street
I blame Tom Wolfe. Reading the Man in the White Suit’s epic 1980s boom-and-bust novel The Bonfire of the Vanities…
Oscar and the oppressors
As the host Ellen DeGeneres joked at the Academy Awards, there were two outcomes that night: ‘Possibility number one: 12…
Family cases
Many men really can only communicate through sport. It provides a ritualised way to argue, to become passionate and to…
One to Watch: Nickolas Butler
I took Shotgun Lovesongs with me to Florida after the Oscars last year, with no intention of actually reading it.…
Podcast
-
That's Life with Julia Hartley-Brewer
The journalist and TalkRadio host joins us for a sideways look at the news agenda.
Most popular
- Read
- Recent
- Read
- Recent
Style
-
The best cameras for travelling
Snapping images on the go has never been easier as camera technology becomes pocket sized.
-
Prince William's only fault? Not doing up his jacket
Despite having been in the shadow of his younger brother, the Duke of Cambridge exhibits near-perfect sartorial style.
-
Why my love affair with the Aston Martin is not about to end
Tanya Gold takes the Aston Martin Superleggera out on a driving date.
Lovely Squares
There’s a surreal sight at the western entrance to the gardens of St James’s Square these days. An isolated set…