BUY November 3, 2011 DIRECTOR OF ESTATE AGENT DOUGLAS & GORDON Q.We’ve been offered a flat but the lease is less than 80 years. Should we avoid buying a short lease? A.The explosion in flat conversions sold off on 99-year leases in the 1980s has meant many of these flats now have leases approaching or below 80 years. In London, [...]
Miami vice: $60m for ultimate pad November 3, 2011 AN almost comically opulent property in Miami’s private Indian Creek Village is soon to come to market. The home, 3 Indian Creek, neatly shows that when it wants to be, America still means bigger and better. Courageously out of sync with high unemployment and a fresh wave of economic woe, this house is an unapologetic [...]
Machine Gun shoots, badly misfires November 3, 2011 Film MACHINE GUN PREACHER Cert: 15 THE true story of a drug-dealing criminal who is moved to help kidnapped children in war-ravaged Sudan, Machine Gun Preacher has explosions, sermons, and Gerard Butler in the lead role of Sam Childers. The real-life Childers found God in 1992 after years of violent crime and travelled to Sudan [...]
SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND | HELENA LEE November 3, 2011 COLLABORATORS Collaborators, a new play about Stalin, is on at the Cottesloe theatre and stars Simon Russell Beale and Alex Jennings. The evening may already be sold out, but day tickets are available, from £12. The play will also be broadcast to cinemas across the world on 1 December as part of National Theatre Live. [...]
A different stratosphere November 2, 2011 DO you dare store all your files remotely? Does the idea of shifting your entire My Documents folder online fill you with dread? Without us realising it, the more the world operates online, the more the world moves towards “cloud computing”. City A.M. asks Paddy Smith, online editor at the tech-specialty magazine Stuff (www.stuff.tv), what [...]
Q&A November 2, 2011 Q.WHAT IS THE CLOUD? A.Instead of accessing files from your hard drive, you are accessing files remotely. Cloud email is simply the way you’ve always accessed your webmail or Hotmail or Gmail. Cloud computing is taking that idea and extending it to everything you traditionally keep on your hard drive such as documents and pictures. [...]
OUT OF OFFICE November 2, 2011 SKYLON COCKTAIL CLASSES Jazz up your Monday and join in Skylon’s cocktail classes. Learn how to make the perfect Manhattan cocktail with mixologist Zoran Peric and evoke old school New York glamour against the London skyline. These drop-in classes are informal, so brush up your classic cocktail skills before taking dinner in the restaurant, or [...]
Houellebecq’s bizarre new novel is (almost) brilliant November 2, 2011 THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ Heinemann , £17.99 THE arcane title of this book should serve as a fair warning to the reader familiar with Atomised, Platform and other cult Houellebecq novels. While those books are driven by sexual desperation and erotic tragedy (alongside the usual heaping helpings of profound dystopia), The [...]
GOING OUT November 2, 2011 The Hawksmoor empire has opened their third and beefiest establishment in Guildhall and its separate 50-seater bar helps reinforce the group’s penchant for cocktails as well as steak. Pall Mall just got a bit posher with the addition of The Balcon and its new St James’s Bar. Drawing inspiration from Coco Chanel’s 1920s Paris apartment [...]
Two cookbooks to add flavour to your winter kitchen November 2, 2011 My Kind of Cooking Mark Sargeant Published by Quercus £20 Odd bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal Jennifer McLagan Published by Jacqui Small £20 Mark Sargeant was a Gordon Ramsay protégé and Head Chef at Claridges formerly unnoticed in the shadow of his boss. Now, he’s done it on his own – [...]