Diary

Mark Hix

My Belgravia project has been dragging on a bit, but it’s set to open mid-January. Belgravia is new territory for me and, as well as the restaurant and bar in the Thompson Belgraves hotel, we have a smoking garden

Amanda Palmer 

Cinema is already the number-one entertainment for the Arab world — big Hollywood films and Egyptian films go down well, and there’s an enormous appetite for feature films

Patrick Perrin

There's nothing like frenzied hammering hours before the opening of your art fair to calm the nerves

Nicky Haslam

Last month I joined a group of cultured ladies and gents for a bus tour of the baroque houses and gardens in Moravia. Most cultivé of all was the tour leader, Lucy Abel Smith, a dynamo of enthusiasm and arcane knowledge, who in four days showed us buildings of such staggering grandeur and, in the case of the Bishop’s Palace at Kromeriz, of breathtaking rococo camp, implicit with apostolic antics and orgy-Borgias

Stephen Webster

I can't believe we are facing the prospect of another Icelandic volcanic dust cloud. The coming week sees me flying to Moscow, St Petersburg, London, LA and finally Las Vegas, where I stay put for a bit to exhibit at the largest US jewellery show, Couture.

Petronella Wyatt

Julian Fellowes's period drama Downton Abbey, the second series of which is being filmed at Highclere Castle, has prompted a flurry of speculation about domestic staff. What is it like for them, and their employers?

Nick Candy

We had a hard time in the credit crunch. When the banks go bust there’s not much hope

Robert Sackville-West

My book is the story of a house with (allegedly) 365 rooms, 52 staircases and seven courtyards that has been inhabited continuously over the past 400 years by thirteen generations of my family

Harry Mount

Early this week, Andrew Neil came round to my north London flat to interview me

Allan Shiach

I was politely asked to step down from the Board of a public company a few years ago. My crime? Being an independent member of that Board for too long

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 Spear's Salon

Books

Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour

Michael Lewis

Kyle Bass, a Texas-based hedge-fund manager who did well out of shorting the sub-prime property market before the 2008 financial crisis, used to play the international strategy board game Risk as a kid, which led him to find out everything about a tiny country called Iceland, which was a key strategic location in the game

The Gentry: Stories of the English

Adam Nicolson

How delicious the notion of the gentry is. How beautifully it shades into every kind of 19th-century fraudulence, into Eric Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition. How easily it locks on to the much later and altogether more middle-class idea of the gentleman

Zahawi and Hancock on 'Masters of Nothing'

Anne McElvoy

The Wide Blue Yonder

A new breed of Tory MPs emerged from the 2010 general election, and already some are making their mark. Anne McElvoy looks at two of Cameron’s cabal

The Diary

Mark Hix

04 Jan 2012

Amanda Palmer 

22 Nov 2011

Patrick Perrin

11 Oct 2011

Nicky Haslam

05 Aug 2011

Stephen Webster

06 Jul 2011