Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. …
Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, at the base of the CN Tower in Toronto, is a lot of fun, and the Dangerous Lagoon is the best of it. It is the aquarium’s largest …
I am usually disappointed by airport food, and by airport coffee even more. So Café Flor, on Schiphol’s D pier, was a surprise. We stopped there in May while we waited to …
Most of us know Elizabeth I only as the powerful queen she became. The Virgin Queen. Gloriana. The pale, jewelled figure in the Phoenix portrait, a woman who ran England on her …
I expected to be charmed. Henry VIII is the king everyone knows, the one from the rhyme, the giant standing square in the famous portrait. I went round the places that carry …
Some nights you just want comfort food. It was a cold evening in early December, I had spent a few hours in Selfridges, and I had not booked anywhere. Selfridges in December …
I had Westminster Abbey near the top of my London list, and the Abbey had other plans. The day I went, it was closed to visitors. Catherine, the Princess of Wales, holds …
There is a stretch of the South Bank, somewhere between Westminster Bridge and the London Eye, where I always stop. Across the river, the Houses of Parliament line the water like a …
Some places make you stop and count the years. Standing in the Lower Ward at Windsor, below the chapel where Henry VIII lies buried, I worked out that the castle had already …
Across the street from Harrods, on the curve of Hans Crescent, there is a café that glows pink even in December. EL&N London had a garland of silver baubles around the door, …
You do not need a ticket to see the best of Buckingham Palace. The building you picture when you think of London (the long pale front, the gold-tipped railings, the balcony) is …
A few steps below the pavements of Whitehall, behind a plain door near Downing Street, there is a basement where Britain ran the Second World War. The Churchill War Rooms are not …
You smell Winter Wonderland before you see it: roasted nuts, mulled wine, fried dough on the cold air. Then you come through the gate and the lights hit you, a tunnel of …
You see Stonehenge from a distance before you reach it, a grey cluster of stones alone on open grassland, and the first thing it does is stop you. I had seen it …
