Rita returns to her ancestral Belgian homelands, and finds that the historical cities have succumbed to a plague of modern public art... Martin McDonagh’s film In Bruges opened the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and went on to become a cult hit. The story of hapless Irish hit men stuck in the ... Read More...
Travel
Nige admires the work of Charles Holden, the architect behind Southgate Tube Station, one of London's finest Art Deco Underground stations... That is not a newly landed art deco UFO above - it is Southgate Underground station, towards the end of the Cockfosters branch of the Piccadilly Line. I discovered this part of ... Read More...
In our second Tim book competition inside a week, we've got five copies of Tim Parks' new book to give away... Thanks to our friends at Harvill Secker we’ve got 5 copies of Tim Parks' new book Italian Ways to give away to members of our Book Club. For your chance to win one, ... Read More...
Nige visits the French town of Dieppe, once home to Oscar Wilde, Frits Thaulow and a society of Anglophile artists... About this time last year I headed for Dieppe to spend a few days as a summer flaneur, a thoroughly restorative trip. Dieppe retains its unique, slightly faded charm, and its ... Read More...
For your pleasure, here is Jassy's account of her recent foodie tour of Venice: bridges and sighs, bigoli and cicchetti, echoing mazes and marriage proposals from fishmongers... A city of bridges and sighs, Venice is also home to the note. Taped to walls and windows, and written in underlined, over exclamation ... Read More...
We may like to think we're savvy travellers, not typical tourists, but things can go horribly wrong... I’ll never forget the moment we realized we were lost – in rural Mexico, neither of us with a word of Spanish, our cruise ship a long bus and boat ride away and due ... Read More...
Toby Ash has just enjoyed a long weekend in Palermo. Just don’t mention the M word... From the moment you land, it’s pretty hard to avoid the mafia in Sicily. Palermo’s Falcone-Borsellino airport is named after two prominent judges slain in the early 1990s for successfully pursing the Cosa Nostra. On ... Read More...
Fortunately I am too young to have faced any prolonged exposure to this thoroughly besmirched foodstuff. Perhaps you dabblers have a particularly piquant memory of these curly triangles of terror? In British humour, the phrase British Rail sandwich refers to sandwiches sold for consumption on passenger trains of the former British ... Read More...
Susan's been globe-trotting again... Arriving at the luggage reclaim in Cape Town, I couldn’t spot a single black face among the passengers from our plane. South Africa does seem to attract a certain type of tourist - less package tour, more ‘comfortably travelled.’ There’s an air of middle-England Middletonia about the ... Read More...
This week Susan has been battling the snow, a cold, and the French - but all in her usual stylish way... “If Britain leaves the European Union, the other members will be cheering,” whispered Lolo in her throaty southern French tones. We were at the launch party for a new Zumba academy. I’d ... Read More...