By: Steve Dinneen

Life&Style Editor I'm the editor of City A.M. The Magazine, and editor of the daily newspaper's Life&Style section. We cover food, wine, going out, culture, technology and travel. I'm also the head judge of our Toast the City awards that celebrates hospitality in the Square Mile. Find me on X @steve_dinneen

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Review: King Lear

February 11, 2014

Sam Mendes’ recent musical production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory only really gathered pace after the interval. It was as if the director couldn’t be bothered with all the establishing stuff and was just waiting to get inside the wacky psychedelic funhouse that is Wonka’s factory, with all its potential for spectacular set pieces [...]
Is Trader Vic’s the worst restaurant in the world?

November 5, 2013

TRADER VIC’S Hilton Park Lane, 22 Park Lane, W1K 1BETel: 020 7208 4113 FOOD ★☆☆☆☆ VALUE ★☆☆☆☆ ATMOSPHERE ★☆☆☆☆ Cost for two with booze (but no dessert): £126.50 OK, let’s get this out of the way: Trader Vic’s is awful. Terrible food served in a rudderless, soulless venue for prices that should make you weep bitter tears [...]
Review: What Maisie Knew

August 23, 2013

FILM WHAT MAISIE KNEW Cert 12A Four Stars Maisie is six years old and already more emotionally mature than her flaky, dysfunctional parents. Her saucer eyes are wise – and sad – beyond her years. We stumble with her from scene to scene, placed in her shoes, trying to work out exactly what [...]
Theatre review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

August 22, 2013

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY | ★★☆☆☆ | thealchemicorder.com The location of The Alchemic Order’s production of The Picture of Dorian Gray is so secret I almost couldn’t find it. Eventually, on ringing the bell of an unassuming Greenwich townhouse, I was greeted by a moustachioed man in Victorian butler’s attire, who ushered me into [...]
Review: Mama

February 26, 2013

FILM MAMA Cert 15 *** AFTER producing the deliciously terrifying The Orphanage and directing the superb horror fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, you would bet your house on Guillermo del Toro nailing what is essentially a stripped down, monster-in-the-house horror movie. This is why I’m not a gambling man. It starts off convincingly enough. The plot – [...]
Review: Money The Game Show

February 26, 2013

In Clare Duffy’s new play, Money The Game Show, two ex-bankers, Queenie and Casino (Lucy Ellinson and Brian Ferguson), explain the financial crisis through a series of audience participation games. Two halves of the audience face each other and in the centre is a platform, complete with cartoon noises and colourful flashing lights that combine [...]
Terminator 2 has shown us why robots should not kill

November 21, 2012

Should robots be allowed to kill people?” It’s a question anyone who has seen Terminator 2 shouldn’t have to think about for long. Killer robots are not, science fiction has taught us, a very good idea. Give a robot a gun and a modicum of intelligence and it won’t be long before it is scheming [...]
On the Road is a sprawling, messy journey

October 12, 2012

FILM On the Road *** By Steve Dinneen Filming a book as iconic as On the Road is no mean task – especially after 55 years have elapsed. In the event, director Walter Salles captures some of the atmosphere but little of the spirit of Kerouac’s novel, leaving me with a nagging feeling that the [...]
In defence of the skeuomorph

September 19, 2012

Apple’s new phone has already become the single most coveted thing in the history of human existence, storming past the Holy Grail, basic sustenance, love and even existence itself (posing some difficult ontological questions that people are too distracted by the iPhone 5 to properly consider). Ahead of the official launch tomorrow, Apple has begun [...]
Hirst’s Tate retrospective is brash, crass and completely compelling

April 12, 2012

Damien Hirst | Tate Modern | ★★★★☆ The killer killed. The inevitability and unfathomability of death. Death, death, death. Spot, spot, death, spot, death. You know what you get with Hirst. His pickled shark has become shorthand not just for his body of work but for a generation of modern art, as have his ubiquitous [...]

Chaos at Heathrow as burst water pipe causes train cancellations

How do professional footballers keep their divorces private?

I’m 50 – but I feel young dining at Simpson’s in the Strand

By: Steve Dinneen

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