The Rake

It takes a lot of heart to wait. It takes a kind of crazy, unwavering, blindly quixotic and bordering-on-irrational faith to wait. And that is the reason we are invariably moved by stories of individuals who have that kind of insane, beautiful heart.

I am resistant to change. It has always been that way. When I was young, I found myself quite badly maimed by a boat propeller; my brother and grandfather had only recently died, so my family’s life could be considered somewhat in flux — an annus hor

Marilyn Monroe may have died 61 years ago, but, like many old-school goddesses — Venus, say, or perhaps Voluptas — she remains omniscient. She’s one of the American Film Institute’s top 10 screen legends. She’s also a meme, a gif, a screensaver, a T-

If you have a penchant for the excitement of live motorsport, or the accessibility of world-class tennis, chances are you’ve seen Immy Barclay around. Barclay is an acclaimed presenter, integral to the coverage of a number of the world’s most prestig

“To call woman the weaker sex,” Mahatma Gandhi once said, is a libel; it is man’s injustice to woman.” Indeed, the phrase was a vapid platitude the moment it was coined. Exhibit A: the voids between the genders in terms of pain threshold and life exp

The best black Russian cocktails money can buy — of the sort you’d expect to be slid across the bar by some manbunned shaker-juggler in Barcelona’s Paradiso or New York’s Katana Kitten — offer up a glorious chemosensory harmony akin to the seraphic c

Let us view this sodden tale through a lens in which alcohol plays a crucial part. We’re talking commercial scent. In 1977, the perfume behemoth Fabergé decided to launch a female-skewed counterpart to its men’s juggernaut Brut 33. It was imaginative

When you’re invited to Mark’s Club for a 50th anniversary cigar dinner, as I was last October, the scene is immediately set for a special night. The menu was scrumptious, the wine diligently chosen, the dress code black-tie, and Jemma Freeman was in

I should begin by acknowledging that I am biased. I’m biased because, as a bespoke tailor, I believe that the way forwards for the fashion industry is to reflect on how and why we shop, and to change our habits so that we buy quality, ethically made

There are two sides to Michelle Yeoh. On the one hand, you have a woman whose report card from her peers and friends reads like a message board at a wedding; on the other, you have a woman who has asserted herself as the greatest female action hero o

It’s a modestly utilitarian object that you’d look at for a long time before the terms ‘high’ and ‘falutin’ came to mind. A round, black ceramic ashtray, five inches in diameter, circa 1950s. The reason that this unassuming receptacle for ground-out

If you ever wondered whether Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning movie, The Great Beauty, was based on a certain Roman lifestyle, look no further. I write this at Villa Furibonda (Villa Furious), on the exclusive Appia Antica, Rome’s oldest cobbled road

DIGITAL TECHNICIAN: DERRICK KAKEMBO LIGHTING TECHNICIAN: JOE DABBS GROOMING: TYLER JOHNSTON AT ONE REPRESENTS USING HARRY’S GROOMING AND ELEMIS MODEL: OLI LACEY AT IMG ■

Don’t you hate seeing that all-caps ‘DELAYED’ notification blinking beside your flight? Twiddling my thumbs at my departure gate, I observed fellow wayfarers amble in and out of the watch boutique opposite me. The intricately finished and painstaking

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