It is high time the steamed pudding made a come-back January 28, 2013 Head chef, Paternoster Chop House Can you remember the last time you ate Spotted Dick? I’m betting that for many of you it was several decades ago at school, covered in lumpy custard. Aside from that eternal favourite sticky toffee pudding, we don’t tend to eat a lot of steamed puddings these days. This is [...]
Breathe new life into your fitness routine January 28, 2013 For the core queen: If you’re one of those people who has left a traditional Pilates class wondering what all the fuss is about, you might like Pop Pilates. Dubbed the “super intense, hard-core version of Pilates”, Pop Pilates sees you performing the traditional bridge with weights; a plank on a Swiss ball and dumbbells [...]
London’s first female-only well-being members club opens its doors in Belgravia January 28, 2013 THE CAPITAL is experiencing a new wave of women’s only clubs. While men have long enjoyed the benefits of the popular Turf Club and Boodle’s, there’s been a void in the market for women – but that’s changing. In September Prada’s sister brand Miu Miu opened a pop-up women’s-only private members club at Café Royal [...]
St Moritz Gourmet Festival insiders’ guide January 27, 2013 AT THE heart of fine living is the art of fine dining. And both are flamboyantly showcased at the annual St Moritz Gourmet Festival this month. Every year the rich and famous flock to St Moritz for the season, and the town prides itself on the exquisite food and wine it has to offer them. [...]
Badrutt’s Palace hotel: a history January 27, 2013 THE INCEPTION of winter tourism to the Alps is attributed to one man – Johannes Badrutt. A hotelier of the late 19th century, Badrutt bet a group of English summer alpine tourists that they would love the winter sunshine of St Moritz as much as the summer meadows. They did. He opened the grande dame [...]
Ben Fogle: everything I’ve done has built up to swimming the Atlantic January 27, 2013 I’M SERIOUSLY afraid of heights and I’m not the best swimmer,” Ben Fogle says as I catch up with him over the phone just after he landed in New York before jetting off to Buenos Aires. But scared isn’t exactly the first word that springs into mind when you think of the 39 year-old father [...]
Lincoln is no ordinary biopic January 24, 2013 FILM LINCOLN Cert 12A **** Entitled simply “Lincoln”, directed by Steven Spielberg and with a score by John Williams, you could be forgiven for expecting a slick, grandiose epic. A small town mid-Westerner who educated himself, struck out on his own, became a lawyer and eventually President, Abraham Lincoln’s life is tailor made for the [...]
Zero Dark Thirty surpasses even Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker January 24, 2013 FILM ZERO DARK THIRTY Cert 12A **** Zero Dark Thirty is military jargon for the precise time, 12.30am, when US Navy SEALs first set foot in Usama bin Laden’s (“UBL”) hideout. It is also the name of director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest collaboration with screenwriter Mark Boal (they are the Oscar winning duo of Hurt Locker [...]
A darkly comic take on Kafka January 24, 2013 THEATRE THE METAMORPHOSIS Hammersmith Lyric **** FRANZ KAFKA’s The Metamorphosis, in which protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into an “Ungeziefer” (usually translated as “beetle”) has variously been interpreted as the most harrowing of autobiographies, a comment on the alienation of modernity and, perhaps most profoundly, the best literary [...]
The best estate car on the market January 22, 2013 Driving a rear-wheel drive car in the snow and ice is the only time any self-respecting petrol-head might wish for front-wheel drive. It’s also when the traction control warning light is at its most comforting. So it was for us, skating our way out of a snowed-in car park on the M2 services, running and [...]