Red Arrows: When Austerity Meets Awe, and Everyone Pretends to Clap By our jaded foreign correspondent who has watched too many air shows from too many bankrupt countries LONDON—The Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows were back on the summer circuit this week, trailing their trademark crimson smoke across a sky the colour of post-Brexit passport…
The NTA Awards: A Glittering Ritual in the Age of Streaming Apocalypse By “Globetrotting” Gideon Graves, Dave’s Locker Senior Correspondent LONDON – Somewhere between the Thames and a Pret A Manger that now charges £7 for a sandwich, the National Television Awards unfolded last night with all the self-congratulatory pomp of a Brexit trade deal….
Mila Kunis, the Chernivtsi-born, Los-Angeles-polished actress, has spent two decades being internationally mistaken for “the one from that thing” and “definitely Russian, right?”—proof that Hollywood’s chief export remains geopolitical confusion. From a Soviet apartment block to the Dolby Theatre, her trajectory is less an American Dream than a very well-lit hostage negotiation between history and…
Gibraltar – A Tiny Rock the World Can’t Stop Fighting Over By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the Strait’s southern shore you can see the Rock of Gibraltar doing what it has done for three millennia: glowering at Morocco like an over-tattooed bouncer who suspects the next boat might be carrying contraband couscous. At 2.6…
Sally Dynevor: The Cobblestone Diplomat Quietly Redrawing Global Maps in a Weatherfield Cardigan By “Dave’s International Despatch & Ironing Service” LONDON—While the rest of us doom-scroll through cascading crises—crypto tsunamis in Montenegro, methane burps in Siberia, election cycles that feel like recurring hangovers—one woman in a sensible pastel twinset has been exporting a uniquely British…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a royal tea-towel must be in want of a Netflix deal. Enter Paul Burrell—once the Queen’s footman, then Diana’s butler, now the perennial ghost at the Windsor banquet—who has spent three decades turning discretion into a cottage industry and grief into a…
The Curious Case of Inka Williams: How a 20-Something From Byron Bay Became the UN’s Accidental Climate Poster Child By Rufus Delacroix, International Affairs Desk SYDNEY—If you’ve never heard of Inka Williams, congratulations: you still possess a few un-monetised neurons. The 24-year-old Australian model-cum-activist has spent the past decade perfecting the lucrative art of looking…
Dubai—population 3.4 million, 92 percent imported—has never quite decided whether it is a city, a brand, or a fever dream induced by too much air-conditioning and not enough irony. From a distance it looks like a hedge-fund PowerPoint got drunk on 3-D rendering software and decided to build itself. Up close it feels like the…
Royal London, International Capital of Regal Schadenfreude by Our Man in the Fog, somewhere between Heathrow’s perfume-drenched duty-free and the £18 pint zone The moment the plane drops below cloud cover, the city unfolds like a gilt-edged pop-up book: Big Ben’s scaffolding finally gone, the Shard pretending it’s Tokyo, and somewhere behind those red-brick chimneys…
Indomitable Lions, Laughable Bureaucracy: Cameroon FC as a Mirror to the World’s Beautiful, Broken Game By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between Douala duty-free and a Paris sports bar On paper, Cameroon FC—officially the Cameroon national football team, nickname so grandiose it could start a land war, “Les Lions Indomptables”—is just another collection of millionaire…
From the banks of the Tyne to the TikTok feeds of Jakarta, Chloe Ferry has become a one-woman soft-power export whose primary raw material is precisely calibrated chaos. Once merely the most pneumatic cast member of MTV UK’s Geordie Shore, she now circulates globally as a living, lip-glossed metaphor for the age of algorithmic fame:…
Laufey: The 24-Year-Old Jazz Bard Who Convinced TikTok That Heartbreak Is a Luxury Good By Dave’s International Desk Somewhere between the collapse of the global supply chain and the collapse of your last talking stage, an Icelandic-Chinese cellist named Laufey (pronounced “LIE-vay,” because of course it is) has quietly become the sonic comfort blanket for…
