ENGLISH WATCH BRAND ON THE UP September 8, 2011 BOLD NEW DESIGNS AND WEBSITE FROM CHRISTOPHER WARD Englishman Christopher Ward set up his watch brand a few years ago with the aim of creating affordable high-quality watches. His latest collection of Swiss-made timepieces sees him reaching a new level of design sophistication. There’s the suavely dressy, hand-assembled “jumping hour” watch, the C9 (below), in [...]
Romantic comedy takes on greatest gothic romance September 8, 2011 Film FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS Cert: 15 IT’S entirely possible that it’s the moribund state of the rom com genre that makes this film seem so sparkily entertaining. After the tawdry likes of Just Go with It, Life As We Know It and No Strings Attached – a film with which this shares some plot similarities [...]
ALSO OUT THIS WEEKEND ENTERTAINMENT September 8, 2011 FILM TROLLHUNTER Rollicking monster movie made, unbelievably, by Norwegian film students. Fun stuff. COLOMBIANA Zoe Saldana, of Avatar fame, stars as a female assasin in this so-so action flick. A LONELY PLACE TO DIE Cracking chase adventure set in the Scottish Highlands. DVD PRIEST Paul Bettany stars in this absurd – but quite fun – [...]
New social app from Grindr makers September 8, 2011 YOUR gay friends are probably all glued to it. Well as of today, Grindr – the hookup app that changed the whole way the gay community finds love, sex and quite often friendship – has a social, non-sexual counterpart, called Blendr. Joel Simkhai, the diminutive, Israeli-born founder of Grindr, insisted to me over coffee at [...]
Redrow profit tops forecasts September 8, 2011 Housebuilder Redrow has posted full-year pre-tax profit ahead of expectations, thanks to a ten per cent rise in selling prices, but warned the outlook for the property market is challenging. Redrow, one of the smaller listed volume housebuilders, made £25.3m pre-tax profit in the year to the end of June, compared with £0.7m in 2010 [...]
Loewe raises the bar for 3D television September 7, 2011 IT’S probably fair to say that 3D is a technology that’s still finding its feet. Hollywood is finding that its efforts to release more and more of its biggest films in 3D are no longer being received so enthusiastically by audiences, though it would help if it didn’t insist on using the technology in such [...]
The tiny part that’s big news for Patek September 7, 2011 BEARING in mind that mechanical watches have followed the same engineering principles for centuries, horology may not seem like an area for frontline, this-is-the-future engineering. Wrong. Take, for instance, the Advanced Research Unit at Patek Philippe, which is doing very remarkable things indeed with very tiny components, using materials more commonly associated with cutting-edge medical [...]
Keep football safe from the stats bores September 7, 2011 FOOTBALL magazine FourFourTwo has launched Stats Zone, which will “change the way you watch football”. For the worst, if you ask me. I can’t stand the kind of “name tag and goody bag” corporate football fan who spends all game staring at his iPhone working out pass rates and possession percentages. If you think football [...]
The Man Booker Prize SHortlist September 7, 2011 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, JULIAN BARNES (JONATHAN CAPE) The only novella on the list: but just because it’s small doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful. This is City AM’s pick of the bunch: British icon Barnes has dished up a book so terse in ideas, heavy in impressions and unrelenting in theme that you’ll be [...]
Oh my, Darling: the former chancellor aims for Brown September 7, 2011 BACK FROM THE BRINK BY ALISTAIR DARLING Atlantic, £19.99 by Marc Sidwell It’s not the economy, stupid. The reason to read Alistair Darling’s account of his time as chancellor of the exchequer is to see exactly how far in he chooses to stick the knife. Happily, his autopsy of the Gordon Brown years at times [...]