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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Calla Jones Corner |Raheem Kassam |Gavin Mortimer |Jonathan Miller
Since moving to France, one of my greatest pleasures has been rushing to pick up my two grandchildren from the tiny schoolhouse in the village of Monthelie. I can’t wait to hear about what they had for le déjeuner. Le déjeuner scolaire, a three- to four-course lunch, subsidized by the government, is sacrosanct. The French even have a phrase for socializing and eating together: la commensalité.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Amy Everett |Piers Morgan |Sean Thomas |Calla Jones Corner
“Arnold Schwarzenegger was sitting exactly where you are,” the boot fitter said, as he handed me K2 Anthems at Aspen Collection, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated ski rental shop and café. “He was drinking Sancerre.” It’s an impossibly “Aspen” anecdote – where else would the Terminator sip French wine, but the resort equally famous for Champagne showers and champagne powder?
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Toby Guise |Sean Thomas |Calla Jones Corner |Toby Young
It’s an incongruous name for a wilderness, “the Karoo.” The nursery-like sound belies the harshness of a vast, arid hinterland separating South Africa’s littoral from its grassland interior. For South Africans, the name is synonymous with bone-dry air, scented heathers, great rock formations, vast skies and even vaster sunsets. The scrubland here is so inhospitable that for centuries it insulated the southern tip of Africa from the rest of the continent.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Calla Jones Corner |Sean Thomas |Toby Guise |Toby Young
Last January, one of the first things my son-in-law wanted to know was if I’d found a “boy toy” after spending a week at Lavey-les-Bains, following our Christmas holiday in Burgundy, where half of us now live. The other half lives in Australia. The renowned Swiss thermal waters lie under the Dents du Midi that rise above Lac Léman in the Swiss canton of Valais like four, glistening white, enamel incisors.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Calla Jones Corner |Ameer Kotecha |Nicholas Farrell |Gavin Mortimer
In November, I was privileged to attend the 91st Paulée de Meursault. There are three coveted invitations at that time of year in this part of Burgundy: the world-famous wine auction held in Beaune and the luncheons called la Paulée de Beaune and la Paulée de Meursault. La Paulée de Meursault celebrates the fine wines grown in this small village.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Calla Jones Corner |Lionel Shriver |Jacob Heilbrunn |Estella Shardlow
I said I’d never go up in a hot air balloon again. But that was a terrified me forty-five years ago. And here I was, relaxed and enjoying the views of the French Côte d’Or with my family and a handful of French people at 1,500 meters, hovering over vineyards, pastures and fields. In 1979 I was contacted by Hans Büker, a thirty-nine-year-old German balloonist who was hoping for some free publicity in the International Herald Tribune, for which I was the Swiss correspondent.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Roger Kimball |Joan Collins |Ross Anderson |Calla Jones Corner
Regular readers will recall my fondness for Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” That crisp declaration is not only elegantly framed but (in my view) true.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Calla Jones Corner |Juan P. Villasmil |Freddy Gray |Gavin Mortimer
How do you choose ten cookbooks out of more than a hundred collected over sixty years? With difficulty. After my beloved husband Richard died, I decided that the only place I would want to live without him was in Meursault, France. The most difficult part was having to leave behind my cookbook collection. For a food writer, it was a daunting challenge. Here is what made the cut.
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Jonathan Miller |Michael Evans |Calla Jones Corner
It’s the rentrée politique this week in France, the start of the political year, a bit earlier than normal. It promises to be a macedoine of absurdist farce and media frenzy. On Friday President Emmanuel Macron, the principal personality in this drama, will begin to see the leaders of some (but not all) of the 14 or 15 political factions that form the dysfunctional National Assembly.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Jane Stannus |Calla Jones Corner |Kate Andrews |Ross Anderson
This doesn’t feel right. I am wrapping plastic around a freshly baked cake, preparatory to putting it in the freezer for thirty minutes. Then, I’m supposed to take it out and gingerly unmold a bowl of ice cream on top of it. Back into the freezer after that for another hour or so. The bowl of ice cream is lined with plastic wrap and filled with layers of raspberry sorbet, mango sorbet and chocolate ice cream.
