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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King Lear at the Old Vic review: Glenda Jackson’s return to the stage is a triumph

November 11, 2016

Glenda Jackson has spent the last 25 years researching the intricacies of political life especially for this role (she’s been the MP for Hampstead and Highgate). It was worth it – and what a loss to the stage the last quarter of a century has been. Her gender-switched Lear is by turns viperous, bawdy and [...]
Lord Stuart Rose: Centralised Stronger In campaign was marginalised by politicians devoted to Project Fear

November 9, 2016

Lord Stewart Rose, the former M&S boss who acted as chair of the ill-fated Stronger In campaign, says he was “marginalised” by pro-Remain politicians who were determined to stick to Project Fear. In an exclusive interview in City A.M.’s Bespoke magazine Rose opens up for the first time about the failed campaign to remain in the [...]
Gordon Ramsay interview: Michelin stars, overtaking the French and why his new restaurant, Le Pressoir d’Argent, is something special

November 9, 2016

“If I’d tried to open this restaurant 15 years ago, I’d have been shot, hung upside-down and had my bollocks put in that thing over there, the pressoir d’testicle.” Finally, I thought. So measured – serene even – was the Gordon Ramsay sitting opposite me, I’d started to wonder if his famously filthy lyricism had [...]
Christmas sandwiches tested: which have been naughty and which are nice

November 8, 2016

We filled a basket with the first crop of Christmas sandwiches – find out which ones we thought worthy of your lunch money and which to avoid like the Grinch. Pret Christmas lunch ★★★★☆ Too much going on here – piles of slightly-too-dry stuffing and a clumping of fillings in the middle. But saved by [...]
Nobu interview: the sushi tycoon talks about family, Robert De Niro, and how his new Shoreditch hotel will be a game-changer

November 8, 2016

According to Madonna, you can tell if a city is going to be fun by whether there’s a Nobu in it. The brainchild of Nobuyuki Matsuhisa and Robert De Niro – or just plain “Bob” – the brand has an uncanny knack of courting the beau monde. Even after 22 years, in which time more [...]
The Accountant review: Ben Affleck stars in silly but fun throwback to 90s straight to video thrillers

November 4, 2016

David Fincher’s Gone Girl has done for straight-to-video thrillers what Wes Craven’s Scream did for the slasher movie. All of a sudden there’s a lucrative niche for acceptably trashy, middle-class mind-candy, paving the way for the likes of The Girl on the Train and now Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant. It follows the apparently mild-mannered Christian Wolff, a [...]
Nocturnal Animals: Tom Ford’s second film is a heartbreaking tale of loss and vengeance

November 4, 2016

Tom Ford has been doing interviews recently decrying materialism, which is a bit like Michael Fish admitting that the weather is a lie. Ford’s second film – after the heartbreaking A Single Man – continues the theme: possessions won’t make you happy, life is short, don’t waste it chasing the consumerist dragon. Where A Single [...]
James Ensor at the Royal Academy: a mercurial painter of the grotesque

October 27, 2016

In the paintings of James Ensor, life is dour and murky while death is a riot of colour and expressive brush-strokes. In one of the first pieces in the Royal Academy’s exhibition two women sit taking afternoon tea (Afternoon in Ostend, 1881) in an oppressively brown room, as if the bourgeois scene is so interminably [...]
Doctor Strange review: The tightest, funniest, most refreshing super-hero movie in years

October 27, 2016

While all around super-hero franchises are collapsing under their own grotesque weight – Batman v Superman, X-Men Apocalypse, Suicide Squad – Marvel stands alone in its uncanny ability to churn out hit after hit. With Doctor Strange, it’s just showing off. Its lead character is a beloved but relatively fringe inhabitant of the Marvel Universe, [...]
The Big Bang 30 years on: How the City went from bowler hats and liquid lunches to smartphones and tossed salads

October 26, 2016

There’s now a whole generation of City workers – and City A.M. readers – who weren’t even born when the markets were deregulated back in 1986. Standing in Leadenhall Market on a week-day afternoon, they could be forgiven for thinking the City hadn’t changed all that much over the last 30 years. Hundreds of besuited [...]

Mandelson was ‘denied security clearance’ yet stayed in US ambassador post

Trump-hating Fifa World Cup fans should have costs paid if denied visa

The Galvin brothers: Our Toast the City award means the world

By: Steve Dinneen

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