No Ordinary Puff Piece

Traipsing through Mayfair’s Berkeley Square during a late summer downpour, one just wishes to escape the dross and find sanctuary in warm and inviting comfort. A wet hop down nearby Charles Street and a charmingly immaculate brass plate indicates I’ve found it. Marcus Lecky Oswald Hornby Birley, Old Etonian and King of London’s private clubbage…
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Lusso 41 Out Now

‘Where have you BEEN!!?’, the huddled and lost legions of Lusso adherents cry as we stride back through the door exactly like the confident antagonist in that great epic narrative of abandonment and resolve, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. The difference is our readers can’t change that stupid lock nor do we have that sad…
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Ticking Every Box – Vertex Watches

London-born watchmaker Claude Lyons founded the Vertex brand in both Hatton Garden and La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, simultaneously, in 1916. A century later, his great-grandson, Don Cochrane, began the journey to bring the name back to life. To commemorate this comeback, he has introduced a brand-new timepiece, the M100 –  the first Vertex since…
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Souked to the Skin: The Spa at Dolphin Square

Luxury developments offer their residents all manner of lovely things to keep them within their secure exclusive walls. But most don’t offer an instant daily visit to the blissful bits of Marrakech.   At the time of its construction in 1935, Dolphin Square’s 1,250 upmarket properties were billed as the ‘largest self-contained block of flats…
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Lusso 40 Out Now

‘Life Begins at 40’ said American psychologist Walter Pitkin in his 1932 self-help book of the same name. ‘This is the revolutionary outcome of our New Era. Today it is half a truth. Tomorrow it will be an axiom.’ Life expectancy in medieval England was around 25 years and only reached forty sometime around the…
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None Too Chablis

Some things go off quicker than others. House guests, like fish, go off after three days (or so Benjamin Franklin advised), whilst an opened tin of yellow bean paste I have in my fridge has been prodigiously enhancing my Chinese stir-fries for the past year. Earlier in the summer a friendship with an Antipodean blogger…
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Robert Clayman: Stone Cold Crazy

The pain comes on very quickly. A twinge that grows into a searing stomach ache that then dulls and settles in, moving round to the side, a deep-seated knife, at once specifically located and yet nebulous and evasive. Within minutes, you’re either in a blind panic because you have no idea why this visitation should…
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For Whom The Bella Tolls

Robert Clayman travels to the Amalfi coast to visit its cultural jewel and stay at a very, very respectable family operation.   Lollo or Loren? For anyone who loves the majestic illusion of Italy’s post-War Dolce Vita, there can be only one and you have to pick a side. Sophia Loren – the bodacious bella…
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