Witanhurst, London’s largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First owned by Arthur Crosfield, an English soap magnate, the mansion was designed in the Queen Anne style and contained twenty-five bedrooms, a seventy-foot-long ballroom, and a glass rotunda;[…]
Some say Phil Taylor is Britain’s greatest living sportsman. At 54, he has nothing left to prove, but will not quit. Does he need the game more than it needs him?
“I wish the bastards dead,” said Mark Rylance. The audience laughed and gasped. It’s not usually a funny line. In Act Four of Richard III, Shakespeare’s psychopathic king is ordering the murder of two children. But when the instruction arrived clear as ice water out of Rylance’s mouth, those five words – by some alchemy[…]
A LITTLE MORE THAN a year ago, shortly before the start of the 2013 Wimbledon championships, Roger and Mirka Federer took a car from London to the pretty village of Bucklebury, in Berkshire, where they had a lunch appointment with the future king and queen of England. Their hosts were Carole and Michael Middleton, the Duchess[…]
We walked the Avenue, the ancient route along which the stones were first dragged from the River Avon. For centuries, this was the formal path to the great henge, but now the only hint of its existence was an indentation or two in the tall grass. It was a fine English summer’s day, with thin,[…]
A dispatch from the war in the Central African Republic Nobody could tell me the dead man’s name. It was a little after nine on an oven-hot late January morning in the district of Combattants in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The man had been lynched by a mob only minutes earlier.[…]