The Critical Commentator

  All Dame Prue Leith wanted was a romantic dinner the night before a special day... "No chance of that," she said, as the pair were repeatedly interrupted by a waiter with a "lecture" accompanying each course. Leith, 85, has taken umbrage with restaurants' addiction to superfluous explanation, which she says has resulted in menus far too long to take in before ordering. During the meal, the couple were handed a map of the location of the restaurant's suppliers and were expected to read it, she wrote in The Oldie magazine... "Pandering to foodies, menu devisers now write essays on every course: 'Hand-dived Scottish king scallops, daily picked marsh samphire from the Solway Firth, Arran victory organic new potatoes' and on and on. Eva's Green Apple Otto Schade (b. 1971) Photo Credit: Fanshaw St, Hackney [CC BY-NC-ND] "Last week I was in what used to be a good pub and is now a gastro temple. I ordered 'sustainability-certified North S...

  By All Means Get Good Wages But - Mind How You Spend Them Sam Fitton (1868-1923) Photo Credit: Gallery Oldham [BY-NC-ND]  Bosses of Britain's largest listed companies have taken home record-high pay packets for the third successive year, according to a thinktank. The latest record, set in the 2024-25 financial year, means the average FTSE 100 chief executive is now paid 122 times the salary of the average full-time UK worker, analysis found. Executive pay has been on the rise for the past four years, partly as a consequence of pay cuts taken during the pandemic, at a time when many households are struggling with a cost of living crisis. The median pay of a FTSE 100 chief executive climbed to £4.58m in the past financial year, up from £4.29m a year earlier, an increase of nearly 7% the High Pay Centre said... Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, said: "These figures will feed a growing sense that low and middle earners don't get a fair share of the wealth t...

  Here  is Judith Butler's winning entry in the 1999 "Bad Writing Contest" for academics, established by the journal Philosophy and Literature. "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibilities of ..." (John Maier, The Observer, 2025) The move from repetition marked a shift in power, thinking and the possibilities of social insights. The Writing Lesson Robert Braithwaite Martineau (1826-1869) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] My hair is a bandmate. It's a way of expressing and flailing and raging. It's like a typewriter. It speaks on my ...

  Sometimes I feel like I have two jobs. One is my day job as a writer for The Times. The other is what's beginning to feel like a full-time career perfecting my night-time beauty routine. Beauty and the Beast John Dickson Batten (1860-1932) Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust [Public Domain] At the moment, it begins with 45 minutes in a red-light sauna blanket that is meant to help inflammation and muscle recovery. While that's going on, I also whack on an LED face mask with a blue light function, which is supposed to help to manage my acne, and a hair mask meant to strengthen my hair. Once that's over and I've showered, I spend another 15 minutes attempting to meditate while sitting in front of a red LED panel, which is supposed to help to manage wrinkles and stress. Then it's back to the bathroom to begin the eight-step skincare routine that involves double cleansing, serums, oils, moisturisers and various face sculpting tools. Then time for dinner, before kic...