Vienna is not a city that reveals itself all at once. Its beauty unfolds gradually, through imperial palaces and hidden courtyards, through music drifting from open windows, through elegant cafés where time …
Migration is not only a Greek story, or an Italian one. It belongs to everyone, everywhere, and it always has: the leaving, the packing of a whole life into one suitcase, and …
Bonjour art lovers! 🌸 Paris is not only the City of Light, it’s also the birthplace of Impressionism, a movement that changed the course of art forever. In the late 19th century, …
I loved the first one. Loved it enough that when a sequel was announced, twenty years after Andy first walked into Runway with the wrong shoes, I was equal parts thrilled and …
This is the boat. Cream hull, varnished timber window frames, lifebuoys strapped to the canopy, a Dutch flag at the bow, and along the side the registration and the capacity: twenty passengers. …
I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …
Hola, beautiful travelers! After exploring Madrid corner by corner and sharing so many stories with you on BubblyLiving, it finally felt like the perfect moment to bring everything together into one sparkling, …
I have stood in front of the Lewis Chessmen more than once, and not one of them has ever looked pleased to see me. They are small, carved from walrus ivory, more …
The word post-Impressionism was invented in London, by an Englishman, about a group of French painters who never once used it themselves. In November 1910 the critic Roger Fry took an open …
I have a habit when I travel. Whatever European city I am in, I look for the Roman layer underneath it. Sometimes it is obvious. More often it is a fragment of …
I have been a Gordon Ramsay fan for years, and I know the reputation: loud, sweary, hard on people. That is only half of him, and it is not the half I …
I have stood at the edge of Monet‘s pond in Giverny, watched the water lilies wrap around me in the Orangerie in Paris, and then, not expecting it at all, found the …
London does Christmas at street level. The lights are strung the length of whole shopping streets, hung under Victorian market roofs and packed along the river, rather than gathered around a single …
Darkest Hour came out in 2017, with Gary Oldman under layers of prosthetic makeup as Winston Churchill in the last weeks of May 1940. Joe Wright directed, and Oldman won the Academy …
A small public service before we start: this is Manet, with an ‘a’, Édouard Manet, and not Claude Monet, with an ‘o’. The two are forever muddled, and I will come back …
Regent’s Park in London covers 410 acres of what was once a royal hunting ground. Henry VIII took the land at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and kept it …
The National Gallery in London turned two hundred in 2025, and to mark it the whole collection was rehung and a few new works came in. One of them is this pastel …
I love The King’s Speech. I have gone back to it more than once, for the plot, for the cast, and above all for Colin Firth as George VI, the performance that …
Before I had ever been anywhere, I knew Venice from paintings. Gold light on green water, gondolas tipped like commas across a canal, a city that looked too lovely to be a …
