Hilary Rose

Realistically, Adele was unlikely to announce her marriage in The Times. Instead, the girl from Tottenham who became a global superstar put an end to months of speculation by simply admitting it in public. She was in the audience over the weekend to see her best friend, Alan Carr, perform his comedy show at a club in Los Angeles. A fellow audience member...

One of the many reasons I’m not on Instagram is the quotes. “In a world full of hate, be love”, makes me feel violent. “No rain, no flowers.” Bleugh. The worst, though, are the happy quotes, morons burbling on with something Gandhi or the Buddha said that makes diddly squat difference to anything, least of all my mood.

So thank heavens for a new genetic test...

Winter 2022. We’ve been reflecting quietly for a few months on how awesome we are, and yet how cruelly misunderstood. “We’re humanitarians!” I yelled at the chickens only this morning. “It is in the very DNA of our foundation, because Archewell is from the Greek word for… arches? Wellness?” The chickens only look at me and cluck.

“They are chickens,” says the...

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, holidaying with one sexual predator might seem like a misfortune. Holidaying with two looks like carelessness. Alas, then, for Prince Andrew, once carefree Air Miles Andy, sometime chum of Kazakh oligarchs and former friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Just when he thought his past might be done catching up with him, along comes Peter...

Carine Roitfeld pushes her hair out of her face to peer at me and asks if it’s OK to smoke. Seeing as she, the grande dame of French fashion and former editor of French Vogue, is at home in Paris and I’m in London, it’s really none of my business. She only started smoking five years ago at the age of 64, which seems a little, shall we say, perverse. She...

If you need a little joy in your life now, as the rain sheets down and the nights draw in, allow me to direct you to a courtroom in Manhattan which is the best show in town.

There, under the implacable gaze of Judge Lewis J Liman, , who claims she was treated...

Now clearly the arrival of the Goop Christmas gift guide makes all right-thinking people reach for their hair shirt while wailing about the cost of living crisis and general global strife. However, my thoughts are generally wrong, not right, so I greet it with a whoop of pleasure.

Where do you start with something this preposterous? In the less than $100...

It has been seven years since Jilly Cooper’s last novel and, apart from Tackle! being set in the world of football rather than racing, reassuringly little has changed. Rupert Campbell-Black is front and centre, because Cooper knows that RC-B is what her readers want, even as we mourn that he’s now a married silver fox, no longer cutting a swathe through half...

Now it goes without saying that objectifying highly accomplished adults on the basis of their appearance is wrong. However, it can also be quite fun. And in the case of the King’s hot equerry, there’s a twinkle in his eye — matron, come quickly, it’s happening already — which suggests he may not entirely mind.

The reason for today’s random objectification of...

As a regular driver in a city bent on my extinction, my beef is not with the curse of the 20mph speed limit. My beef is with people who now go even slower. The one thing worse than trundling along at 20 is trundling along behind someone doing 15 or 16. Why make this torture worse than it needs to be?

The answer is obviously to do 20 on the nail, 21 if you’re...

The last time I checked, Gwyneth Paltrow was the queen of clean and wholesome. The multimillionaire founder of Goop, a beauty and wellness brand based entirely on her own beauty and wellness, was invariably photographed looking wholesome in the summer , with £40 sunscreen and a pompom beach bag available to buy, link in bio...

So William wants to talk about the new series of The Crown, covering all the ghastly awfulness between 1997 and 2005, and the Netflix publicity shot they’ve released, but the comms people want to talk to me about the state visit to Kenya, and my darling wife walks in wearing a pith helmet.

“Darling,” I say mildly, “you’re wearing a pith helmet?”

“Well...

Just as we start hygge season, when you can’t move without reading about cunning Danish ways with thick socks and hot chocolate, along comes another word for us to contemplate before thinking “no”. This time it’s Dutch, and it’s “niksen”, the concept of doing nothing.

This is not a concept many of us have much time to think about, but I like the idea that...

Oh, the irony of Akshata Murty stepping on stage at the Conservative Party conference and telling delegates: “I am not on the agenda today.” Well, you are now, love. It’s less than a year since her husband became prime minister and in that time Murty, 43, has had to gaze adoringly at him more times than I’ve had hot dinners. Now this, a ...

Her Highness Princess Haifa bint Muhammad al-Saud is tired. She left her home in Riyadh two weeks ago and has been in a different country every day since, waking up in a different penthouse and wondering where she is. She is the vice-minister of tourism for Saudi Arabia, and she brings exciting news of tourist visas and modest swimwear. We meet in a...

Congratulations to my fellow citizens for twigging what I’ve known for years: baths are boring. I haven’t had a bath for 20 years. I would have taken the bath out of my flat altogether and turned the bathroom into one big shower room if an estate agent hadn’t advised against, on the reasonable grounds that even if I don’t like baths, other people do.

Now...

In a bright-yellow studio in Chelsea filled with make-up bearing her name, Trinny Woodall is explaining what stimulates her. “Moving a woman to a place where she feels better,” she says, snapping her fingers, “where you notice that blossoming [another snap], where you want to go, come on! [Snap.] Be here, be present, feel yourself, you’re great.” Woodall is...

Stiff drinks: 3. Cigarettes: 5. Cans of Elnett hairspray: 1. Crowns: 0
So, we’re in London, at Clarence House, and it’s bally freezing because my darling husband insists on having all the windows open. I lean out of one of them, light a cheeky fag and ask him if there’s any chance we can close a few in winter. Charles stands up, hooks his thumb in his suit...

Tell-all memoirs of shagging and carousing used to be the preserve of ageing rockers and actors, talking about things which happened years ago. Now everyone writes them, however implausibly young, and athletes’ tend to be detailed accounts of how many hurdles they needed to jump in the dark before school, and the role of lean chicken in their path to glory...

While everyone else boiled abroad over the summer, I put on extra jumpers in Oxfordshire. One day I was persuaded, against my better judgment, to visit Diddly Squat, Jeremy Clarkson’s farm, half an hour’s drive up the road.

First up: whoa, Chipping Norton! What in God’s name do the road markings mean in your town? Is it a junction? A roundabout? Who has...