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“A knock at the door. It’s the Kangaroo” Mondo Baltimore The grandest dame | Why I love the time warp of The Peninsula Hong Kong and probably always will

Books of the year

"More so than ever in 2024, it seems to me to take courage – the against-all-odds kind – to publish anything"
“A knock at the door. It’s the Kangaroo”

“A knock at the door. It’s the Kangaroo”

by Neil D.A. Stewart

"One rears up like a wolf’s muzzle aimed to the vast sky; another clump, hollowed out from beneath by sea and air, resembles the underside of an enormous petrified fungus"
Mondo Baltimore

Mondo Baltimore

by Simon Gage

"He points us to the shops along this stretch, places like Parisian Flea, crammed with essentials from antique jewellery and caps saying 'What the fuck are you looking at?'"
The grandest dame | Why I love the time warp of The Peninsula Hong Kong and probably always will

The grandest dame | Why I love the time warp of The Peninsula Hong Kong and probably always will

by Mark C. O'Flaherty

"The most special thing about the hotel in Hong Kong is, for me anyway, the time warp of Felix, the restaurant that Philippe Starck designed in 1994"
Writing despite and to spite it all | The best books of 2024

Writing despite and to spite it all | The best books of 2024

by Neil D.A. Stewart

"More so than ever in 2024, it seems to me to take courage – the against-all-odds kind – to publish anything"

Effervesce Sense: What a lovely pairing

"The snooty local wine shop doesn’t sell it because it’s too common. But if it’s good enough for the locals, it’s definitely good enough for me"

The fox in the marble henhouse | New Hotel, Athens

"The original carcass was the Olympic Palace, a post-war slab, once home to men in suits and heft glasses, and women in stiff hair"

Effervesce Sense | High tea high and a bottomless widow

"Bottomless champagne is rarely seen this side of one’s first wedding when daddy is paying"

Hey see Fantaisie | Martin Brudnizki’s jardin-in-Paris hotel

"This is peak Brudnizki: Pale pink velour barstools, and red roses on green and pink stripes on the walls and ceilings"

To the moon and back | Pina Bausch’s Vollmond returns to London

"I was horrified that the audience for last year’s Sadlers Wells revival of Nelken seemed to find its portrayal of fascist brutality rollickingly hilarious"

So nearly the best business class seat of all time. But…

"Such a shame. This is so nearly the perfect business class seat"

Don appetit | Rowley Leigh’s return to London dining

"I poured the sauce into my dessert spoon and ate by itself, mouthful by sumptuous sticky mouthful"

The best fancy dim sum in Hong Kong

'I have no idea what made Michelin knock a star off, because this is as good as Cantonese gets"

Whatever kills you

"I’ve taken just about every drug you can think of, and loved most of them, but never fostered a smoking habit." Italy's fashion capital has banned smoking in public and Mark C. O’Flaherty is all lit up

Effervesce Sense | Sparkling expectations

"It’s a stupendous, momentous bottle but it’s also extremely fun to drink"

Sandy Powell's screen presence

The three-time Oscar winner is currently the subject of a 40-year retrospective at SCAD

Effervesce Sense | Sparkling victory or sparkling defeat

"Before I was a member I did accidentally filch one of its bespoke flutes which match the Taittinger BAFTA-labelled bottles"

Shooting Leigh Bowery

Photographer Fergus Greer's remarkable portfolio of work with the iconoclastic designer

In full Bloomsday

"Approaching Dublin with Ulysses in mind, if not in hand, is like wearing a set of bifocals that fractures the city into complementary parallels: so much has changed a century later, and so much seems unchanged"

Review: Grand Hotel Central, Barcelona

"I spent all night sweating in a club called El Coño de Tu Prima and passed out at 5am in a dorm echoing with drunken screams from Las Ramblas"

Review: Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul

"I’ll contentedly consume any quantity of bodily grotesquerie, haunted houses and monstrous otherings, and Supplication delivers on all these"

Effervesce Sense | First tastes in the wild

"Strains of a harp float through the gloaming, revealing fire pits and white marquees in a woodland clearing. This is what a Bollinger Bacchanalia looks like"

Jesus moment | Park Hyatt Hyderabad

"City hotels that become miniature cities themselves are my Umberto Eco chambers of delight"

Blood and guts

“Don’t deceive yourself, passion never gets forgiveness." Mark C. O'Flaherty follows the Pasolini path in Italy, from birth to murder

100 years of La Mamounia

"The whole place thrums in a kind of postcoital way"

Too loud down under | Ace Hotel Sydney

"I saw one guest fall down them and another trip up them in a few minutes: not the best first impression"

Vintage Melbourne

Neil D.A. Stewart explores some of his favourite city's hidden Victorian secrets

A Danish double | Koan and Kadeau, Copenhagen

"Korean food is having a moment. South, I mean. The North is, well, doing whatever it is the North does"

Seen anything good?

"For some, going to festivals is all about parties, meetings, lunches, drinking, not getting that taxi you wanted speaking the local language wrong and losing your apartment keys"

Effervesce Sense | Fear not the armpit

"Mention Greek wine to most people and instantly, “It’s not retsina, is it?” is flung back in your face. This Brut Cuvée is such a far cry from the gut-wrencher I brought back from Athens in the 90s"

Buzz reads

Neil D.A. Stewart on the best books of 2023, and the one that really should have won