The Rake

The refrain from one of my favourite songs, Where Eagles Dare, by the iconic Misfits, goes, “I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch, you better think about it, baby”. Increasingly, I think it would be a fitting epithet on my tombstone. I’m joking, of cour

Mahler said that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. The holiday spirit comes in different styles and strengths, but its destination is invariable. Mankind rallies to the hearth and table. Knives flash, corkscrews clea

In Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V, published in 1963, the anti-hero, a discharged and feckless U.S. navy sailor named Benny Profane, is watching an unspecified Randolph Scott western and comparing himself unfavourably to its square-jawed, morally ri

He was an ordinary second-generation British kid of Kenyan descent, growing up in a modest street in an anonymous town around 20 miles north of central London. Then one day, Abubakar Salim picked up a games console controller, and a love of narrative

In January 1977, the Los Angeles Times dispatched a reporter to Almería in southern Spain, where an actor whose career was threatening to make an indentation in the U.S. market was shooting a Foreign Legion drama called March or Die. After spending s

“A dog,” as the charity slogan goes, “is for life, not just for Christmas.” But for anyone who’s watched An All Dogs Christmas Carol — the 1998 anthropomorphic spin on Charles Dickens’ much adapted novella, and the last instalment in the admittedly m

For a company that puts family and community first, 2020 has proven to be a rollercoaster of a year for Brunello Cucinelli. Not only did Signor Cucinelli’s youngest daughter, Carolina, and her husband, Alessio Piastrelli, welcome their son, Brando, i

Dukes Bar in London is renowned for its martinis, but equally so, we imagine, for the man behind them. Alessandro Palazzi has been in the hospitality industry since the 1970s, and his unwavering determination to make each of his guests feel like roya

If destiny has a poster child, there’s a fair chance her name is Bebe Buell. As far as conservative towns go, the naval enclave of Portsmouth, Virginia is as starched as they come. As far as conservative eras go, the early 1950s was one of buttoned-d

A common interpretation of the Audemars Piguet Code 11.59 collection, unveiled at SIHH in 2019, is that it epitomises, in beautiful harmony, two distinct eras in the brand’s history: pre- 1972 traditionalism and post-1972 avant-gardism. Few readers o

Japan’s first moniker for ‘suit’ — sabiro — may have been named for Britain’s Savile Row, but it was in Italy that the nation’s early tailoring apprentices began to train, and from where they brought back the soft-shoulder silhouettes and rolled lape

The story goes something like this: there is a boy who floats, and his father thinks it’s wonderful until he sees how it frightens other people, so he weighs his son down with rocks in a rucksack in order to stop the gesticulations, derision and judg

On paper, the squadron formally established at RAF Northolt in London in 1925 should have been anything but an elite battle unit — and could easily have remained anything but had two global alliances not gone to war as the middle of the 20th century

Raynald Aeschlimann is already something of a legend in the watch business. Among a long list of accomplishments, he became the first chief executive in the Swiss watch industry to harness the power of social media by creating a limited-edition timep

All the people selected as Rakes of the Year for 2020 were chosen for their extraordinary efforts during this most difficult of times. Paul Feig has contributed in spades. By the time you read this, he will have performed — and, make no mistake, they

Gary Barlow wears his cultural importance as if a loose garment. His significance has sustained now for nearly three decades, and in truth he has converted his celebrity status into something meaningful, an achievement others would do well to emulate

The story I wrote about Kidane Cousland and Solomon Golding in August seemed to lift a lot of people’s moods. One explanation was that the photoshoot was spectacular, and they are naturals to shoot. But primarily it was because their story is one of

There are three things I admire about Daisy Knatchbull. The first is her work ethic, which I came to admire when she was the head of communications at Huntsman, where she would invariably be the first person to arrive and the last person to leave, eq

A few weeks ago, I spent several hours in a car with Nick Foulkes going to and returning from the countryside. For those of you who like to keep track of such things, we smoked a noughties Cohiba Lanceros each, and, on the way back, we settled for so

The Rake stayed at The Glenelg Inn, Ross-shire With thanks to the team at Eilean Donan Castle, Kyle of Lochalsh, and Audi Sam Heughan is Scotland’s most popular export in the 21st century. This is not exactly verifiable or quantifiable, but I must er

One of my favourite discoveries of 2020 has been Holthinrichs Watches. Michiel Holthinrichs, who is based in Delft, a town about 50km from Amsterdam, has created precisely the type of watch that I feel the collecting community has been searching for.

François Moreau has always had a fascination with gauges. It is something that becomes abundantly clear at our first meeting, in Mexico City, during the 2019 El Salón Internacional Alta Relojería — an event that now appears to have taken place a life

Even for the casual observer, a loom weaving an intricately designed fabric is a hypnotic sight. For those who adhere to the tenets of this magazine, witnessing weft interlace with warp — based on complex mathematical sequences that, like the chalk e

It is difficult to pin down what exactly it is about cars that elicits such passion and devotion from those who love them. For those on the outside, spending tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of your particular currency on a car seems ridiculo

in association with

If the beatification of timepieces could be deemed a globally recognised creed — Organised Horologism, if you will — what buildings might qualify as holy sites? Any number of architecturally eclectic constructions dotted around the Jura mountains wou