Stone, light, and fire | The Largo, Porto

"Upstairs, the mood remains tactile yet restrained: oak, stone, brass, and linen of the artfully crumpled sort"

Effervesce Sense: Happy World Champagne Day

"Every day is a good enough reason for a glass, but Krug isn’t an everyday champagne"

Merci! Adults only

"As a stressed adult, I have a list of things that relax me on holiday, and the presence of children isn’t one of them"

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"

Land of hops and glory

A week on Kangaroo Island, the world’s most aptly named landmass

Mondo Baltimore

"You are obliged to sign an agreement saying that you will seriously fuck your house up with tacky Christmas lights"

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"

The grandest dame

The Peninsula Hong Kong is as much a time capsule of the 1990s as it is the 1920s

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"

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"

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

The best books of 2025

Ten year sentences

Step back in time | On Doctor Who fandom, time travel and keeping the faith

Review: Homework A Memoir by Geoff Dyer