Travel
Still De Trop After All This Time
Falling in love with St Tropez is easy — though getting your hands on a bit of première classe real estate there is anything but, says Alan Page
WSJ: Luxury property owners sue Credit Suisse
Property owners at four U.S. luxury ski and golf resorts are suing Credit Suisse Group AG for $24 billion, accusing the Swiss bank of running a "loan-to-own" program that loaded the resorts up with debt so it could foreclose on their assets when the debt couldn't be repaid.
Yule Fools
How can you go away for one week and come back to find your country taken over by the ghost of Christmas Passé?
Snow Time Like the Present
His Excellency confirmed that the Cresta Club was very worried about the effects of global warming on the run. In 25 years' time, Hedgehog suggested, we could be looking at the Cresta log flume.
Fast Times in the Big Apple
All New Yorkers wondered how they could party into night on Halloween and yet run or cheer the marathon the following morning. Work hard, play hard!
No Easy Way Out
As life gets more stressful, we are going to greater lengths to relax — a paradox that hoteliers understand very well, says Clive Aslet
High Society
William Cash, in Ibiza, joins the A-list jet-set whirl of The Society, Dudley Spencer’s club with an international calendar of social events
Tsar Quality
The buildings, the ballet, the borscht! Josie Goodbody on the splendours of St Petersburg
Snob Appeal
A new species of ‘global Russian’ has evolved — with its very own private members’ club and in-house magazine, says Andrei Navrozov
Paint It Red
Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley’s book Londongrad chronicles how the Russians came, saw and conquered the capital. In this extract, they describe how the oligarchs drove the art market into a frenzy
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
HNW Events
Spear's/Speechly Bircham Seminar: How to be a philanthropist in the 21st century
21 February 2012
Spear's Young Turk Awards 2012
01 April 2012
Spear's Design for Living Awards 2012
01 May 2012
Spear's Wealth Insight Forum 2012
19 September 2012
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