The Rake

Whenever I write my letter, I tend to go down one of two routes: superfluous and whimsical or dead-serious and sentimental. As I look at the news today, I see a new Islamic emirate set up by a death cult that has been left to summarily execute musici

Not long ago, a fresh rumour gained traction amid the phantasmagoria of the QAnon conspiracy theoryindustrial complex. It held that John F. Kennedy Jr. had faked his death in a plane crash in 1999 and was about to emerge from a Pennsylvania bolthole

Artie Shaw was easy to love but hard to like. Good looking, immaculately stylish and supremely talented, he dominated the swing era as the ‘King of the Clarinet’, inciting the devotion of the jazz cognoscenti and the paying public — as well as many o

I can tell yooz all, being a hybrid is a source of immense pride — and I’m being dead-ass truthful about that. Being a designer dog means that I’m neither one of those arbitrary mutts with the genetic variety of a U.N. summit nor one of those darned

In an assisted living facility in Beverly Hills, there lives a spry 92-year-old named Edith Tooker. Secreted away until the time is right is her memoir, Backless in Hollywood and Other Tales. It’s a document so incendiary that it could reframe Hollyw

I t’s a typically radiant morning in Los Angeles, but Benicio Del Toro is feeling a touch of the blues. Bereavement, to be exact. The deceased, who died a few days before our conversation today, is a man he didn’t know personally. In fact, he saw him

The rudimentaries of many ancient human innovations — from animal husbandry to timekeeping via beaded jewellery and blacksmithing — have been fixed ever since they were conceived. Like certain tangible inventions (the paperclip, the mousetrap and the

It’s reasonable to speculate that the invention of the stirrup, and its journey to Middle Ages Europe from Jin Dynasty China — allowing horse riders at either end of the Silk Route far greater control of the animal, especially while wielding weapons

In the late autumn of 1994, a New Yorker magazine article caused a bit of a stir. An icon of eighties Manhattan — the author Jay McInerney — had profiled an icon-in-the-making of nineties Manhattan: Chloë Sevigny, “the It Girl with a street-smart sty

As ‘the Beast’ knocks on the door of three decades as one of the most distinguished sports chronographs, Audemars Piguet have unveiled a new riff on their perennial favourite: the Offshore 43mm. With versions in titanium, 18-carat pink-gold, and stai

There is a good reason that autumn is the favourite season of many style arbiters: from mild Indian-summer evenings to sunny yet crisp days, autumn gives ample opportunity to dress up as well as down, and play with a multitude of layers and materials

I make no secret of my loyalty and love for the house of Wilsdorf. In fact, if you cut me in half, I suspect it would say ROLEX TUDOR around the circumference of my core, much like a stick of Blackpool rock. In light of this mono-focus, I think I sec

What, in sartorial terms, do George Clooney (in movie premiere mode), Ralph Lauren (in American workwear mode), and Keith Richards (in Keith Richards mode) all have in common? The default response might be, “About as much as the musical output of Bow

The phrase ‘family car’ may for many of us conjure up images of prosaic school-run vehicles and anthropomorphic jalopies in old kids’ movies, but not so the family whose eponymous watch brand was founded in 1888, when Carl Friedrich Bucherer opened a

Everyone loves a watch that fulfils a purpose. Dive watches made to conquer depths that we will never reach. Chronographs intended to time laps we will never race. Even dress watches, paired with tuxedos we rarely wear. We find intense joy in the spe

Connoisseurs who relate to the sobriquet ‘liquid sunshine’ — bestowed upon whisky by the bottle-bothering Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw — may, each time they stroll down St. James’s Street in London, imagine they can see a golden miasma around

According to the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University, memory works in the following way: it is encoded in the senses either acoustically, visually or through tactile experience. At this stage, information flows from the cortex — the area richest i

I’ve been travelling for the past four weeks, with two more weeks to go. Before I go into the details of my trip, let’s pause to examine the enormity of this. As I left a world that had essentially been locked down to contain the spread of the most v