Microsoft Surface Book review: unconventional design hides one of the best Windows 10 laptops you can buy February 18, 2016 From £1,299 | ★★★★☆ microsoftstore.com Microsoft’s hybrid laptop-tablet is a profoundly weird looking thing. If the Macbook Pro is your darling child, the Surface Book is the adolescent son who didn’t know when to stop growing. It’s oddly tall, gawky even, thanks to its 4:3 aspect ratio screen. This makes the keyboard look and feel [...]
Cocktail bar Gong is unashamedly luxurious, and the best place in London to get hitched February 16, 2016 At the end of last year I was faced with the terrifying prospect of having to decide where to propose to my then girlfriend (now, thankfully, fiancée). I was at a loss. I’ve got a bias for hotel bars, but most don’t afford you the privacy to bend down on one knee and ask another [...]
Bentley Bentayga review: behind the wheel of the the world’s fastest luxury SUV February 15, 2016 As the second hour standing in LAX’s dreadful arrivals queue passed, I realised my schedule was going hopelessly awry. I still had a 130-mile drive to Palm Springs: in LA traffic, four hours or more. Factor in no food and nearly 24 hours without sleep, and Bentley’s Bentayga luxury SUV launch seemed to be in [...]
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies review – plus the rest of this week’s biggest film releases February 11, 2016 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (15) | ★★☆☆☆ Dir: Burr Steers Rarely has a film been more self-explanatory than this horror comedy which re-imagines Jane Austen's classic in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, with both the Bennet sisters (including Lily James's Elizabeth) and Mr Darcy (Sam Riley) now highly trained to fend off the [...]
The Witness review: solve hundreds of tricky mazes on a bizarro mystery island February 11, 2016 PC, PS4, iOS (coming soon) | ★★★★☆ The Witness is a smart, beautiful first-person exploration game that’s tied together by a seemingly endless string of maze-like puzzles. Over 600 of them. When have you ever seen that many mazes in one place? Never, that’s when. If you think that’s a mark of success, then you’ll [...]
XCOM 2 review: a game of difficult choices, dire consequences and little alien men February 11, 2016 PC, Mac | ★★★★★ The XCOM series tells the timeless story of an extremely polite alien invasion in which everybody has kindly agreed to take turns fighting, chess-style, rather than piling on to one another in a furious mess of guts and explosions and insectoid limbs. XCOM 2 doesn’t stretch the idea too far, feeling [...]
Need some Valentine’s Day ideas? We’ve got you covered with our expert guide to the perfect date February 10, 2016 It’s almost Valentine’s Day, the yearly celebration of big kisses on the mouth, so you know what that means: candle-lit dinners, small boxes of chocolate cubes, asking your beloved to turn all the lights on and off in quick succession to create a strobe effect as you dance every kind of forbidden sex-dance there is. But [...]
Discover the twin islands of Saint Kitts and Nevis, where peckish golfers can tuck into local flora February 8, 2016 With its hazy azure waters lazily lapping the white-sand beaches, and sun seekers pondering which rum-based cocktail to slurp next in the penumbra of a palm tree, the West Indies remains an alluring destination to escape London’s dreary winter. But why stick with one Caribbean island when you can easily fit a couple into the [...]
Escaped Alone: Caryl Churchill’s incisive take on four women’s friendship has an absurdist streak February 4, 2016 Royal Court | ★★★★☆ At 77, Caryl Churchill isn't so much slowing down as paring down, Pinter-style. Lately, the veteran dramatist – prolific as ever – has been trimming her running times and discarding the grand experimental gestures of her early work, while keeping her wit and moral seriousness. Escaped Alone hews to the trend: [...]
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review: a powerful and blues-driven exploration of 1920s race relations February 4, 2016 National Theatre | ★★★★☆ In this National Theatre production of August Wilson’s 1982 play, larger than life blues legend Ma Rainey commits her performance of Black Bottom to vinyl, in a troubled recording session that becomes an incisive metaphor for black American experiences and white exploitation. (Black Bottom, if you were wondering, was the 1920s’ answer [...]
