Paul Levy

Nothing rivals a traditional Chinese banquet for opulence

6 July 2024 9:00 am

Imperial feasts in the 18th century would last several days – and it was considered the height of bad manners not to gorge on the variety of meat and fish on offer

On the road with Danny Lyon

30 March 2024 9:00 am

The celebrated photojournalist describes his peripatetic youth recording revolution in Haiti, hunger and homelessness in Mexico and the civil rights movement in the US

In defence of foie gras

11 November 2023 9:00 am

A single meal in Rome is a lesson in Italian history

10 September 2022 9:00 am

Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV…

Bisexuality was the Bloomsbury norm

11 June 2022 9:00 am

It’s been a century since the heyday of the Bloomsbury group, and now Nino Strachey, a descendant of one of…

Don’t be seduced by fake truffle oil this Christmas

18 December 2021 9:00 am

Truffles smell of sex. Even if we can’t quite say what we mean by ‘smell’ or ‘sex’ in this sentence,…

We shouldn’t be so squeamish about eating foie gras

15 May 2021 9:00 am

In his excellent, brief chronicle of foie gras, Norman Kolpas lists Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Thandie Newton, Ricky Gervais and…

Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure

12 December 2020 9:00 am

Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so…

The West’s industrial-sized chicken farms could be as dangerous as any wet market

18 July 2020 9:00 am

It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in…

Kashrut dietary laws are ill-suited to lactose-intolerant Jews

18 April 2020 9:00 am

Until fairly recently, all over the western world there were specialised eating places catering largely for Jews who respected the…

Hamlet

Alas, poor Hamlet — now presumed to be overweight

3 August 2019 9:00 am

Do you regard fat as a noun, a food substance all humans eat and need? Or as an adjective, denoting…

Jewish food to relish and cherish

13 April 2019 9:00 am

In matters of culture and ethnicity, I take my lead from my old friend and guide Sir Jonathan Miller. Like…

Hemingway with Martha Gellhorn on a shooting expedition, c.1940

The unimportance of Ernest Hemingway: why should we bother reading him anymore?

26 January 2019 9:00 am

What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in…

Is the threat of capital punishment really the foundation of good behaviour?

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Richard Wrangham embraces controversy, and appears to enjoy munching apples from carts he upsets himself. While his new book seems…

Donald Trump is coming to Blenheim – and the protesters are ready

14 July 2018 9:00 am

For more than 40 years we’ve lived in a beautiful, listed, Cotswold stone, Stonesfield slate-roofed farmhouse in Oxfordshire. The trouble…

Portrait of Carrington by Mark Gertler

Love and letters in a Bloomsbury triangle

9 December 2017 9:00 am

Dora Carrington (1893–1932) was at the heart of the Bloomsbury story. As an art student, she encountered the love of…

Alice Waters shows the Prince of Wales around her ‘Edible Schoolyard’ garden in California

Alice’s restaurant

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known…

The Normansfield Theatre in Teddington, a beautiful ‘lost’ Victorian playhouse, is still used for concerts and music-hall evenings, and by small opera companies

Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

9 September 2017 9:00 am

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…

Kathleen Kennedy arrives in London

Kathleen Kennedy kicks over the traces

4 June 2016 9:00 am

Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey…

The polite anti-Semitism of 20th-century Britain

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…

Author Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson's Shylock is full of mercy and compassion

30 January 2016 9:00 am

Howard Jacobson’s novelistic riff on The Merchant of Venice for the Hogarth Shakespeare project turns, unsurprisingly, on what makes some…

Guy Burgess

James Klugmann and Guy Burgess: the wasted lives of spies

5 December 2015 9:00 am

Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged…

From ambrosia to zabaglione — now with added slavery

13 June 2015 9:00 am

This Oxford Companion ranges from the sweet to the decidedly salty, while being the most politically correct reference book you will ever consult, says Paul Levy