Ten years ago, if you’d ordered a coffee anywhere in Britain, you would have found yourself looking down at a circle of watery brown liquid with a smattering of bubbles scattered over the surface. It looked as though someone had added a dash of detergent to dish water and then blown into it absent-mindedly through […]

The pope is about to abolish the notion of limbo, the halfway house between heaven and hell, or as Dante had it, the fist circle of hell. The >>BBC

A woman in a Robin Cousins tuxedo dances with a dog wearing a flashing LED collar to a James Bond medley. They’ve got moves that combine Saturday Night Fever with police dog about to take down a suspect. Spotlights spin around with a heady visual reel. The crowd gets into it. The camera swoops around […]

The food chain is a concept that was probably never intended to carry irony. Nevertheless, I’m on a plane tucking into poached salmon 30 thousand feet above the spawning pools where this very fish may very well have been born. The salmon is a cast member of a ‘restaurant-quality gourmet meal’ – a set piece […]

London isn’t a beautiful city in the classical sense. It’s more an agglomeration of unorganised stuff. It’s more a two thousand year draft of a city, with rewrites to plot, characters and events scrawled all over its terrain. It’s a city where your state of mind is as important as the physical fabric. For example […]