Features

Dire Another Day

So, goodbye, Keir Starmer. Though I never knew you at all, you had the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawled. They crawled out of the woodwork, and they whispered into your brain. Specifically, they whispered: “Burnham’s got a seat....

...BUT TWO VERY DIFFERENT PATHS

The four-decade friendship between A-listers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is astonishingly enduring, given the fickle nature of Hollywood. Yet the choices made by these Boston buddies, who together won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting, could hardly be more...

I fell foul of fashion’s deadliest trousers

They’re my favourite buy of the summer – a silky pair of blue and white wide-legged trousers and matching top. Or a co-ord set, as the fashionable people would say. They’re not actually silk. They’re 100 per cent polyester and were – whisper it – dead...

Jack Mosley

After my dad [Michael Mosley, the TV doctor and diet guru] died, mum and I received thousands of messages from people who wanted to let us know just how much he had helped them. They spoke of reversing their diabetes, or dramatically improving their...

THE SCARY TRUTH ABOUT SAUSAGES

You can’t beat a banger. Whether it’s a Lincolnshire, cocktail or Cumberland sausage, they are the unifying factor across fry-ups, parties and barbecues and a firm staple in the British diet. When it comes to our health, the news isn’t all gloomy....

‘It’s impossible to enjoy a body you’ve known only how to hate’

After the demise of my first long-term relationship at 23, I stopped enjoying sex and stopped being able to climax. For some years, I put this down to being “broken” and simply “not a sexual person”, until a chance encounter with a fellow guest at a...

The eco-fascists turning climate change into a race war

Alfie Coleman was 16 when Britain went into Covid lockdown and, like many teenagers, he spent more time online than he should have. Doomscrolling in his bedroom, he found much to trouble his young mind – including apocalyptic warnings about climate...

Find the right shades to frame your face shape

Eyewear experts spill the secrets to selecting a pair of sunglasses to match your features and personality. By On what basis did you choose your last pair of sunglasses? Because you lost your previous pair and needed some to hand? Because you were...

Are you in the stress danger zone?

Short cuts to beach chic

How white working-class kids lost the grammar school race

Jemima* is mixed race, but when she first toured Queen Elizabeth’s School with her eldest son, she was struck by the lack of diversity at the north London grammar. Founded in the 16th century and located in Barnet, Queen Elizabeth’s consistently ranks...

‘Islamists want to dominate, not integrate’

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Bring back Miliband? That’s bananas

Ambassadors are paid to be calm and collected, but the European envoy who rang me out of the blue seemed utterly exasperated. Could I meet him and a colleague in half an hour? Yes, it was important. The colleague turned out to be a visiting diplomat...

Why Madonna has swapped Manhattan for Marylebone

When Madonna describes a beachside town as her “idea of heaven”, one pictures a beautiful location catering to the super-rich: the squares of St Tropez in early summer, perhaps, or the hidden coves of Capri that are accessible only by boat. What one...

Holly’s high-risk comeback

What to eat to beat the heat

Record temperatures and a rare Met Office red warning this week have caused school closures and travel disruption – while amber warnings are still in place and set to continue into the weekend. When temperatures soar like this, most people know to...

Brexit 10 years on: Allison Pearson, David Frost and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Is it really 10 years? I’ve been trying to cast my mind back to the actual moment when we knew. Sleepy but glued to the TV, determined to stay awake, hoping against hope that, despite everything, we could do it. Rochford, Forest Heath, Eden, Erewash....

How to beat the heatwave

EXPOSURE THERAPY

It’s a boiling hot Sunday when I pull up to the big green gates of the Heritage Family Naturist Club, at the end of a leafy lane in Berkshire. Secretary Ken Clark meets me, as arranged. He’s naked from the waist up – I thought I’d have time to...

Air rage, alcohol and estrangement:

Family members often pick sides in an acrimonious divorce, but it’s unusual to see children publicly declare their allegiance to one parent and estrangement from another. Yet, that’s exactly what seems to be happening with Brad Pitt and Angelina...

THE NEIGHS HAVE IT

Why Eton is the perfect fit for Prince George

‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet was like being in a rock band’

Kevin Whately is easy to spot in the foyer of Garsington Opera’s studio space, nestled in an idyllic corner of the Chilterns. He sidles up, his round, boyish face instantly recognisable from the hit TV shows Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Peak Practice,...

Decline and fall of the aristocracy

The ad campaign that sparked a pile-on from the pro-Gaza mob

Gwyneth Paltrow has always rubbed people up the wrong way. Born rich, well-connected – you might have heard of her godfather, Steven Spielberg – and beautiful, she was perceived as a “nepo baby” in Hollywood long before it became Instagram’s insult du...

The unlikely cult of Jane McDonald

The nightmare seating plan for Taylor Swift’s wedding

The world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift, will marry American football player Trevis Kelce next month in a ceremony so feverishly anticipated (and secretive) that it makes the Prince and Princess of Wales’s 2011 nuptials look low-rent. Swift is...

I was a pro-Palestine fanatic... then I went to Israel

It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel on October 7 2023 that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state. Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following...

Derek Jacobi 'There is no such thing as a working-class actor any more'

At 93, Joan Collins is still queen of the red carpet. What’s her secret?

Dame Joan Collins is fighting fit, but you don’t have to take her word for it: she has the paperwork to prove it. “I just finished making a movie, My Duchess, a few months ago,” she says of her latest role, in which she portrays Wallis Simpson in her...

The English eccentric is a vanishing breed – just when we need them most

Heads turn as the man known as “Soho George” approaches an Italian café in Frith Street, in London’s West End. He is dressed in a houndstooth suit with a custom-tailored calf-length jacket, a pale bolero hat, bowling shoes, dark glasses, chunky gold...

I’m a cardiologist. These are the mistakes midlifers make which can lead to heart disease

I grew up in Sicily, starting each morning with a walk around my tranquil town, before enjoying a breakfast prepared by my mother, with fresh coffee, buckwheat bread, yogurt and fruit. Our diet was simple and rich in fresh whole foods: a dinner of...

Why a Welsh dandy dyed his Pomeranian lilac

Even among the gallery of rogues, popinjays and oddballs that comprise the more colourful parts of the British aristocracy, Henry Cyril Paget stands out. Born in 1875, he was an Eton-educated child of Empire whose ancestor lost a limb at Waterloo....

Wake up your wardrobe with dreamy ‘dayjamas’

There was once a time when wearing pyjamas in public signalled either a nervous breakdown or a killer hangover on the school run. Now, the chicest women in Europe are spending the summer dressed as though they have just floated out of bed at a boutique...

The photogenic women changing the face of the far-Right

Not so long ago, the stock image of someone from the far-Right was male, probably bald, with tattoos and wearing steel-toe-capped boots. Times, however, have moved on: this week, it was reported that the Government had banned seven “far-Right...

‘However good my singing is, trolls still comment on my weight’

“The French really know how to write sensual music,” swoons Aigul Akhmetshina. The 29-yearold Russian mezzo-soprano is singing the role of Delilah when Richard Jones’s colourful production of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila returns to Covent Garden this...

‘My alma mater isn’t the same – my son would feel like a minority’

For three generations, the men in Tom’s* family went to the same British public school. His grandfather started there in the 1930s, his father in the late 1960s and Tom himself in the 1990s. He and his wife always assumed their own son, Hugo*, would...

‘They turned their backs on us’: the pupils taking on their striking teachers

As teenagers prepared to sit their English literature exams yesterday, the pupils at Connaught School for girls, in Leytonstone, east London, were also getting ready for a more fundamental challenge. Shortly before 8am, a band of teenage girls...

I will not be bullied into silence – rational debate is good for society

What better place to meet Matt Le Tissier than The Dell pub at St Mary’s? As I arrive, the man who ended 103 years of history at Southampton’s old ground with a fairy-tale goal is playing darts while chomping on a Double Decker. “Drink?” he asks,...

David Attenborough Britain's natural treasure

The ‘redneck at heart’ who is smashing Taylor Swift’s records

She’s the Bible-reading, horseloving, gun-owning “redneck at heart” taking over the global charts. Ella Langley, an Alabamaborn country singer, was barely known outside of Nashville 18 months ago; now, the 27-year-old is being touted as the new Taylor...

Faces at this year’s fashion shindig are beyond belief

Well, so much to discuss from Monday night’s little shindig in New York. The fact that the Met Gala’s tickets are now so extortionate (rumoured to cost up to $100,000 [£74,000] each) that even the luxe-iest of fashion houses are pulling back. The...

Why baby boomers really do have it better

At the age of 32 – the same age my daughter, Charlie, is now – my husband Ross and I were the proud owners of a beautiful four-bedroomed farm conversion, with two acres of garden in the countryside near Alcester in Warwickshire. Two large cars sat in...

How Labour burnt its bridges with voters in Wales

Wales was once the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution. By the 1820s, it was responsible for 40 per cent of Britain’s iron exports, pioneering new technologies such as Henry Cort’s “puddling” method, which made wrought iron cheaper and more...

Why the biggest mistake you can make is to retire

Perhaps your dream of retirement involves sailing off into the sunset on a round-the-world cruise? Or maybe you’re planning to play 24/7 golf, interspersed with the odd spot of Sudoku? Lyndsey Simpson says those of us who are thinking of this stage of...

Falkland Islanders: ‘Our home is not a tradeable rock’

In the 190 years they have spent on their chilly South Atlantic outpost, Falkland Islanders have been called many names, not all of them polite. To Argentines, they are colonists, pirates, “Kelpers” or, simply, the Británicos who squat illegally on...

More women are willing to go under the knife to get ‘ballerina boobs’

reset. “For decades, larger breasts have been tied to a very specific beauty ideal shaped by media, celebrity culture and commercialisation which promoted bigger breasts as more feminine and desirable,” says the psychologist Carolyn Mair, author of...

The aristocrat who became an ANARCHIST

Labour’s grip on my beloved Wales began with a Keir and will end with a Keir

I was switched at birth

‘Our Motown contracts were like slavery’

Otis Williams, the founder and, at 84, last surviving original member of the Temptations, remembers the night in 1964 when the group was performing at the 20 Grand Club in Detroit. Smokey Robinson said he had a song he wanted them to record. It was a...

A sex pest in Qatar threatened to rape my wife – but I was the one thrown in jail

What the Brisitsh get wrong about fish

Why is anti-capitalist Dale Vince paying himself millions?

How dating became a cruel tightope walk for amen

BINKY vs THE BAKER

The vast majority of social media influencers think they can have their cake and eat it. At least that is the conclusion Reshmi Bennett, owner of Anges de Sucre, a luxury London bakery, has come to. Bennett founded her business 15 years ago; she has...

THRONE TOGETHER

It was four days after the death of Elizabeth II that the nation saw her four children come together. The new King Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward stood silently in vigil, backs turned to her coffin in St Giles’ Cathedral,...

Genius jackets for jeans

‘When he opened the bag, he must have thought he’d hit the jackpot’

Imagine for a moment that you are a Soho pickpocket, just shy of 30, of no fixed abode, and a dab hand at working the streets of London. An enterprising bag thief such as yourself might like to keep a checklist for a job well done. Phone and wallet?...

The 1970s food revival with a healthy twist

BAD RAP

The backlash to the booking of Kanye West as the headliner of a London music festival was nothing if not predictable. Surprise that West was to play Wireless, his first British gig for 11 years, turned into outrage that a rapper with a long history of...

The town that banned smartphones

The essential elements of a great British walk

The British love a good walk – it’s the nation’s favourite active pastime by a country mile. We’ve been hiking in nature for pleasure since the 18th century, when the Romantics made it look so dreamy. In the 1930s, the Kinder Scout mass trespassers...

The celebrities who are actually nice ...and those who aren’t

Villain: When Jeremy Clarkson mercilessly mocked my driving Marianka Swain I am a terrible, terrible driver. I learnt to drive in London, when I was 19, which didn’t help – it must have the most impatient motorists in the world. But the nadir came...