Leo is still terribly in love. “I have a heart broken,” he told me last night. The cause of this is still Eloise who has now apparently fallen in love with a boy with dark hair – can you imagine? “It’s not about how cute you are mummy,” he told me angr …

I have never before cut and pasted something to share with you, and I hope I am not in breach of any copyright laws, but this is one of the most brilliant, tragic and thought-provoking articles I have ever read. It is from the New York Review of Books …

Question: what do Gwyneth Paltrow, Hugh Grant, Mika, Clive Owen, Kevin Spacey, Michelle Rodriguez and I have in common? Answer: we were all at the Laureus Sports Awards at the Emirates Palace Hotel on Wednesday night. The Oscars may have been and gone …

So my Zeldafication begins in earnest on Tuesday when I go to an advanced adult ballet class with our lovely new lodger Una, who was at ballet school until she was 14. Yes I know that I am not advanced, but did that ever stop Zelda? So wish me luck. Me …

I have always been rather intrigued by the idea of the salon; it seems to me a perfect combination of drinking and thinking. According to Wikipedia it is “a gathering of intellectual, social, political, and cultural elites under the roof of an inspirin …

Picture the scene: I am doing yoga looking out over a 90 degree view of Jumeirah Beach in Dubai from the comfort of the 34th floor. Someone is pressing the dress I am going to wear this evening to dinner with my husband in a private dining room. Two cl …

I am the victim of a hate campaign from an otherwise peace-loving nation. It is not a nice experience. I am being inundated with emails, comments and facebook messages from extremely angry Swedes. The reason for their anger? An article I wrote for the …

We were at the hairdresser’s yesterday reading short story entries for the magazine’s annual short story competition while Hassan transformed our lanky hair into luscious locks. Here is the outcome: And here is an email Bea wrote to Rupert, it is vinta …

While I was in India last week I interviewed the writer Amit Chaudhuri. He was charming and interesting and terribly middle-class. He comes from a middle-class Bengali family, grew up with “servants” as he called them (interesting note we PC Europeans …

If I were to be reborn I would like to spend my childhood, or at least some of it, in Abu Dhabi. While I am mad about a kind of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ upbringing in England I wonder how possible that is any more and also if life as a child here also ha …