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

All 1142 Articles

The Horror Show! at Somerset House is bizarre and brilliant

October 28, 2022

The Horror Show! at Somerset House is hands down the weirdest major exhibition of the year. What sounds like a common-or-garden spooky Halloween show is in fact a kind of potted history of British counterculture from the 1980s until 2010. At least I think that’s what it is – after spending well over an hour [...]
Elton John’s new Tammy Faye musical is a glitter-ball triumph

October 28, 2022

It’s hard to imagine a better team to assemble a new musical. James Graham: the prolific young playwright behind works including Best of Enemies, Quiz and The Vote. Rupert Goold: the Almeida’s artistic director who’s been involved in some of the best plays of the last decade. Jake Shears: the singer and songwriter behind the [...]
Good at the Harold Pinter theatre sees David Tennant on fine form as a reluctant Nazi

October 15, 2022

CP Taylor’s 1981 play is a strange beast, the action tumbling through space and time as David Tennant’s professor John Halder recalls the events leading up to the Holocaust, for which he is accidentally, kind-of responsible for, in a roundabout way. Halder is a literary professor in 1930s Germany who once wrote a novel about [...]
Apple Watch Series 8 review: More of the same good stuff

October 13, 2022

Place the new Apple Watch Series 8 on your desk besides the Series 7 and even Tim Cook would have trouble telling them apart. It keeps the same smooth curves and ultra-slim bezels as the previous generation, which itself only incrementally updated a design that had remained the same since 2018. Unlike the iPhone, the [...]
How Hawkes Cidery is making liquid gold from unwanted apples

October 13, 2022

If you happened to be at this weekend’s third-tier clash between Forest Green Rovers and Bolton Wanderers, you may have been greeted by a strange sight: fans turning up with bulging sacks of apples. The club – dubbed the most sustainable in the country – is working with Bermondsey-based cidermaker Hawkes in its annual bid [...]
Stephen Frears on Kings, Queens and ‘catastrophic’ politicians

October 11, 2022

“You think you’ve reached the bottom and somehow the Tories manage to effortlessly make it worse.” This observation is delivered as soon as I enter the annex of the Soho hotel where I’m to interview lauded director Stephen Frears. Here to promote his new film about finding the remains of Richard III, he’s installed himself [...]
Eureka Day Review: Helen Hunt shines in culture wars drama

October 2, 2022

When playwrights take aim at the culture wars, it’s usually those on the right they have in their sights. But Jonathan Spector’s barbs point towards the liberal left and the ludicrous situations that can arise when political correctness really does go mad. Eureka Day takes place in the titular primary school, a progressive Californian institution [...]
iPhone 14 Pro Max review: The notch is gone and other stories

September 30, 2022

When Apple went fullscreen with the iPhone X, doing away with all but the slimmest black frame around the display, it divided the world into two categories: regular people, and those who vehemently, violently hated “the notch”. The notch, for those struggling to remember the furore it caused back in November 2017, is the little [...]
Colour of the year: ‘It looks like magnolia with a hangover’

September 25, 2022

There is something wonderfully absurd about the annual colour of the year awards, which attempt to dress up selling paint as a sort of sociological barometer. What shade captures the public mood right now? What hue best describes the world today? According to Dulux, that would be Wild Wonder. The paint-maker describes it as a [...]
The Clinic at the Almeida: A disjointed play that asks the Big Questions

September 15, 2022

The Clinic has all the right ingredients to be a solid state of the nation play. Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s new work is probing, well acted, dramatically staged. But somehow the pieces just don’t fit together, the souffle doesn’t rise, and the result is frustratingly disjointed. It’s a play that asks Big Questions about the modern black [...]

Reform UK tax cut pledge raises doubts

The season finale economy: Why we undervalue the Premier League

Jinkx Monsoon’s Judy Garland musical proves drag is serious art

By: Steve Dinneen

All 1142 Articles

Subscribe