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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Best of Enemies at the Young Vic: A dense, ambitious political tinderbox

December 17, 2021

James Graham is among the best political playwrights working today, responsible for gems including This House, innovative live-streamed election-night saga The Vote, and the screenplay for the lauded TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War. His plays are painstakingly researched, probing the innards of political life and finding moments of joy, humour or horror amid the [...]
Spider-Man: No Way Home review – Marvel delivers pure cinematic sugar

December 17, 2021

Logistics aren’t sexy, but throughout Marvel’s latest Spider-Man adventure I was struck time and again not by the antics of the heroes on the screen but the ones in an office in Los Angeles. How many scheduling clashes must have been overcome, how many legal meetings someone must have sat through, in order for this most [...]
Novel coronavirus: Meet the writers who penned a book during lockdown

December 3, 2021

They say everyone has a book in them, but usually that’s where it stays. Writing a novel is a time-consuming business, a months- or years-long project, often undertaken with little guarantee anyone will ever read it. Every successful author has their ‘origin story’, from JK Rowling scribbling away in an Edinburgh cafe to Dostoyevsky bashing out The [...]
Amy: Beyond the Stage at Design Museum is a bittersweet triumph

November 26, 2021

There are echoes of the V&A’s famous David Bowie exhibition to this new show at the Design Museum, which charts the legacy of another pop icon: Amy Winehouse. Ten years after her death, her rise and fall remains as poignant as ever. And while the Design Museum might not seem like the most obvious place [...]
The Manor at National Theatre: A conga line of middle class back-slapping

November 26, 2021

Every couple of years the National Theatre – an institution I love in my bones – has a crack at a farcical satire of modern Britain, and every time it makes a total bollocks of it. There was 2017’s deplorable Saint George and the Dragon, an allegory so blunt it would have struggled to pierce [...]
Royal Court’s Rare Earth Mettle tarnished by antisemitism controversy

November 19, 2021

There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but casually offending the Jewish community in a play that counts cultural sensitivity among its themes must come pretty close. Ambitious satire Rare Earth Mettle centres on the megalomaniac billionaire previously known as Hershel Fink, a man with no apparent ties to the Jewish community apart [...]
Little Scratch at Hampstead Theatre: A challenging adaptation

November 15, 2021

The idea of the “unadaptable” novel has been repeatedly debunked, with film and theatre directors finding ways to bring works of impossible abstraction or density to the stage or screen. Fitting neatly into the category of “possibly unadaptable” was Little Scratch, the debut novel from Rebecca Watson, a free-flowing stream of consciousness that blurs the [...]
Apple Watch Series 7, review: Stylish but lacks killer feature

October 21, 2021

Now in its seventh generation, the Apple Watch is approaching elder statesman status. It’s a fine piece of kit, both useful and stylish, but has entered a phase in its development cycle where improvements have become incremental: a smaller bezel here and a better battery there. For new buyers, that’s great news: the Series 7 [...]
Halloween Kills, review: More silly than scary

October 18, 2021

Michael Myers is the perfect frontman for the Halloween franchise: an ageing but unstoppable juggernaut, pulling the same old tricks from all the way back in 1978 to an increasingly bemused audience. It’s no wonder director David Gordon Green wanted to try something new when he took over with 2018’s franchise reboot. Alas the curse [...]
The Normal Heart at the National Theatre is a desperate howl

October 8, 2021

In the same week Matthew López took home the Best Play gong at the Tony Awards for The Inheritance, a work that has drawn strong comparisons to fellow Tony-winner Angels in America, the National Theatre began its revival of the original play chronicling the AIDS crisis: The Normal Heart. Larry Kramer’s semi-autobiographical 1985 play follows [...]

Starmer’s future hinges on May election reckoning, polling expert says

Battle of the Sexes tennis: Billie Jean King says it’s just entertainment

The Italy holiday taking in amazing skiing and a lesser-visited city

By: Steve Dinneen

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