Over recent years there have been rumblings of an Ideal revival, possible as a feature film, but for its anniversary it’s ...

I love that our patron saint in England is St George. What nationality do you think he was? Not English of course. St George ...

As a student of literature picking up a modern novel involving interwar lavish consumerism in the West, I’m bracing myself for something rigidly estranged from the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

And so to the hottest dining ticket in town, Bangkok Diners Club, upstairs in the Edinburgh Castle pub in Manchester’s Ancoats. It’s a new venture from husband and wife team Ben and Bo Humphreys from ...

It’s July 2025, the hottest day of the year, and I’m clearing out my desk in the OperaWatch office at Northern Soul Towers. After 12 years as Northern Soul’s Opera Correspondent, I’m stepping down.

Whenever the English gather, the talk soon comes round to the best ‘full English’. Along with the ubiquitous Sunday Roast, this collection of eggs, bacon, sausage and beans with various add-ons such ...

The backdrops to a decade, the details which define a period, have a ubiquity which renders them invisible. It’s only when they do disappear – like Paperchase leaving a stationery-shaped hole in the ...

I have come to the realisation that I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I love dinosaurs, but I never wanted to love dinosaurs. In fact, I went through a period of hating them, resenting them, and ...

Like the opening scene of a movie, Crewe Hall appears in all its magnificence at the end of a long drive between our world and another. We are now part of its history, an old house warmed with ...

When Bonnie Raitt was a young girl, she was enthralled by the power and charisma of such blues and folk greats as John Lee Hooker and Sippie Wallace, modelling her own music and guitar-playing on them ...

Flickering on the screen of an old BlackBerry, its landscape display diminishing them in scale, they could, at first glance, be part of any number of blazing bodies – logs burning with homely warmth ...

There were other Barbie movies. Before the one that didn’t quite live up to the existential dread promised by its trailer, there was an entire parade of them, each an incremental step forward in the ...