Nothing rivals a traditional Chinese banquet for opulence
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
The celebrated photojournalist describes his peripatetic youth recording revolution in Haiti, hunger and homelessness in Mexico and the civil rights movement in the US
A single meal in Rome is a lesson in Italian history
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
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
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
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
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
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
Until fairly recently, all over the western world there were specialised eating places catering largely for Jews who respected the…
Alas, poor Hamlet — now presumed to be overweight
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
In matters of culture and ethnicity, I take my lead from my old friend and guide Sir Jonathan Miller. Like…
The unimportance of Ernest Hemingway: why should we bother reading him anymore?
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?
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
For more than 40 years we’ve lived in a beautiful, listed, Cotswold stone, Stonesfield slate-roofed farmhouse in Oxfordshire. The trouble…
Love and letters in a Bloomsbury triangle
Dora Carrington (1893–1932) was at the heart of the Bloomsbury story. As an art student, she encountered the love of…
Alice’s restaurant
Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known…
Pleasure palaces and hidden gems
Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…
Kathleen Kennedy kicks over the traces
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
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
Howard Jacobson's Shylock is full of mercy and compassion
Howard Jacobson’s novelistic riff on The Merchant of Venice for the Hogarth Shakespeare project turns, unsurprisingly, on what makes some…
James Klugmann and Guy Burgess: the wasted lives of spies
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
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
