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Alex Preston
Alex Preston tries out the tastefully tricked-out townhouse offering the best of Ramsay and just a hint of Ripper… When I first moved to London as a stripling, I lived with a group of friends in a grand Georgian townhouse on Wilkes Street in Spitalfields. It was wood-panelled and atmospheric – Jack the Ripper had killed…
Alex Preston goes back to school and gets wood. Or something. From St John’s Wood Tube, I fancied I could hear – above the din of the taxis barreling down Wellington Road – the sound of willow on leather. It was March and bitterly cold and I was dressed in a pair of white trousers…
I had been to the W Leicester Square before. In June 2011, the hotel launched its (W)riters’ Library, commissioning ten authors to choose their favourite books to populate the shelves of the hotel’s library. I was one of those authors, joining Geoff Dyer, David Nicholls and Naomi Alderman (amongst others) at the glitzy opening bash.…
Evolution is often invisible. Because of the dead-ends that are necessarily pursued in the quest for those next great steps forward, what feels like an advance could ultimately turn out to be just another dodo. A recent stay at the Palazzo Tornabuoni in Florence made me think that this particular innovation in the way the…
I’m finally reading Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. It has moved up and down the teetering pile of books beside my bed for months, gently taunting me. I have heard great things about it, but always something more pressing has intervened. This Friday, though, I will read it, losing myself in the wartime world of…
From art deco lidos in Miami to the futuristic bird’s nest of the Park Hyatt’s pool in Tokyo, I wanted my swimming – which I think of as an aesthetic, as much as an athletic, pursuit – to take place in suitably picturesque surroundings. I had seen a photograph of the swimming pool at the…