A stay at Valsana Hotel in Switzerland, the geothermally powered Alpine retreat January 4, 2019 These days, a sense of wellbeing isn’t just about body and spirit but also about leaving a lighter carbon footprint. Which is why the new, eco-friendly Valsana Hotel is the perfect place to spend an Alpine spa weekend without feeling that you’ve given Mother Nature a battering. The Valsana is Switzerland’s first hotel to be [...]
Desert X is Coachella’s lesser known contemporary art festival and it’s drawing 200,000 art lovers to the area January 4, 2019 The locals were… curious. For the past few weeks, as they’d gone about their business around the nine cities that make up Greater Palm Springs, or hiking in the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, strange things were afoot. A deep hole was being dug into the desert floor close to the small resort town [...]
From Veganuary to Dryathlons, so begins the month of self-inflicted misery… January 4, 2019 The first few weeks of the year are when the office mood is at its glummest. Blue Monday, a concept created in 2005 (albeit by a holiday company trying to get people to book), and billed as “the most depressing day of the year” falls soon. No one agrees if it’s the second or third [...]
From sugar to saving, this government is treating us like a nation of children January 4, 2019 The morning I turned eight, I woke up and told my father that I was “halfway there”. This, in my home state of Connecticut, was in reference to getting my driving licence, a process I could start on my sixteenth birthday. As a kid, this was the milestone that I was most excited to reach, [...]
The films, theatre and art shows to see in 2019, from Toy Story 4 and Avengers: Endgame to Van Gogh & Britain and Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal January 3, 2019 Toy Story 4; Dir: Josh Cooley; June Despite Disney’s emphatic assurances that we’d seen the last of Buzz and Woody, here comes Toy Story 4, an inevitable sequel to the classic animated trilogy about a bunch of dolls who occasionally come to life to torment deserving humans. Most of the original cast has been lured back [...]
One of the USA’s most iconic hotels, Ocean House is famous for its timeless coastal experience dating back to the Victorian age January 3, 2019 With its fancy turrets, myriad windows and pastel-lemon façade, Ocean House is an imposing place. Found on the bluffs of Watch Hill, a well-to-do town in Rhode Island, on first appearances it’s a hotel that looks like a stuffy, Victorian grand-dame, fitted in an overblown crinoline dress, and exuding old-fashioned principles. In part, its looks [...]
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse review: The missing link between comics and live action superhero films December 21, 2018 My love affair with comics started not with the works of Stan Lee or Alan Moore or even Tim Burton, but with Saturday morning cartoons; X-Men: The Animated Series; Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends; Silver Surfer. And while the often brilliant spandex movies that have been churned out on an industrial scale over the last [...]
Welcome to Marwen review: A visual triumph but a soggy, mawkish film December 20, 2018 Welcome to Marwen takes some of the most impressive character animation since Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa and welds it to a film so saggy and lacking in introspection that even those glorious visuals soon lose their lustre. It tells the true story – insert your own inverted commas – of Mark Hogancamp, a reclusive artist suffering [...]
Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse review: This Pulitzer winning play is a comprehensive dissection of de-industrialised American heartlands December 20, 2018 Following the US Presidential election in 2016, a slew of reporters were hastily dispatched to the backwaters of de-industrialised America to discover why large sections of the working class population there thought Donald Trump was the answer to their problems. They needn’t have made the trip. This play by Lynn Nottage, first performed in 2015, [...]
The Favourite: Olivia Colman is extraordinary as Queen Anne in this provocative period drama December 20, 2018 Anyone remember Queen Anne from history class? Me neither, but if Olivia Colman’s blistering portrayal of her is anything to go by, I can see why. The last of the Stuarts, she spent her final days in the early 18th century severely depressed following the death of her husband and 17 children, and hobbling about [...]