England's glorious win over the French at Twickenham last weekend highlights the joys of sport. On paper, victory looked impossible. There was hardly any singing in the first half as we awaited our fate; then, slowly, it dawned on us that we were playing rather well. Fear became hope, and hope became belief. By the end, none of us could hear ourselves for shouting. It is the unpredictability of sport that makes it such a thrill.
At the Cheltenham Festival this week, emotions are running equally high. There is no race meeting of such raw emotion in the world. Jump racing offers a passion the Flat can never match. Desert Orchid, Best Mate and Arkle are household names; flat racing has no stars of that stature to compete for the nation's attention, and yet it enjoys a far bigger percentage of the prize-money.
Even worse, it was announced this week that Ireland's top two year old, Holy Roman Emperor, is to be retired to stud before even starting his three-year-old career. We will never know how good he is. Sadly, he was raced to breed, rather than being bred to race. That is not something of which that the so-called Sport of Kings should be proud.
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The Rococo jewel nestled into vineyard terraces that's a visual index of 'a king’s Enlightenment belief in knowledge, cultivation and the civilising power of Nature'A summer picnic in 1743 prompted Frederick the Great to create a retreat for himself outside his capital at Berlin. The result was the creation of Schloss Sanssouci in Brandenburg, as Aoife Caitríona Lau explains.
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Caveat renovator: The TV star, the writer and the salvation of a crumbling farmhouseThe actor, writer and comedian Robert Webb and his comedy writer wife Abigail Burdess embarked on a renovation project in 2019 which became far more than they imagined — and just as the job is at last complete, they've decided that it's the right time to put house on the market.
