Despite my lack of Hungarian, and his limited English, I managed to conduct a conversation with the head waiter in the dining room at the former Carmelite monastery in the forests of Sopronbánfalva, a district in the city of Sopron, close to the Austrian border.

I was there for five days in a refurbished monk’s cell. Nuns were there until the 1950s, the early post-war years when the country became a satellite state of the Soviet Union. The sisters commissioned some of the lavish art found in the adjacent church, where the devil is portrayed with the features of Stalin in one particular painting. The monastery later became an asylum, and eventually fell into disrepair until the refurbishment began in the early 2000s. Much of this was conveyed by the waiter, who by the third evening was responding to my questions about Hungary - its culture, its politics, its longest-serving Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. When asked his views on the country’s relation…

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The penis has come a long way since it was concealed behind the knee of a naked Yves Saint Laurent in the advertising campaign for his scent Pour Homme, in 1971.

The designer wears nothing but his signature spectacles. He has silky, shoulder length hair and is remarkably androgynous, but perhaps more significantly - vulnerable. His lean frame is closer to that of progressive rock fans or British porn actors of the era - figures formed by copious cigarettes, tinned food, strong tea and instant mash. In hindsight the portrait by the photographer Jeanloup Sieff is distinct because it’s free of the machismo implicit in the male centrefolds that started a trend the following year.

The American edition of Cosmopolitan was the forerunner with that infamous Burt Reynolds pin-up. Shortly before the release of Deliverance the actor was photographed by Francesco Scavullo, who’d previously captured Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro - …

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Heading into south-east London via docklands in early spring last year, I passed a spray of flowers propped against a wall to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Derek Jarman.

The artist lived in various riverside warehouses in the 1970s, arriving at the third floor of Block B Butler’s Wharf in 1973. During his first summer there, he wrote in his diary: “The studio is a forest of emerald-green columns, at sunrise, the ducks float in on the driftwood over a glacial river which reflects orange and vermilion, while the sun pours through the doors.” By 1979 , however, he had jettisoned the old grain warehouse, having tired of lording it over a “gay Butlins”.I’ve never been a fan of Jarman’s art or even his films, many of which feature in a new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. As a native Londoner with a link to the neighbourhood that Jarman made his home in the 1970s, and with a passion for the Kent coast around Dungeness where …

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Day One. Months before a Miami trip was mentioned the Baxter Dury track of the same name was uppermost on my Spotify travel playlist sandwiched, oddly, between ‘Moskow Diskow' and the latest from Mr Jukes.

On arrival I wondered if Dury had a point: 'Welcome to Miami now/Broken promises are here'. The city was new to me. Prada, the reason for my visit, less so. (The new store here is a break with the past and a glimpse of the future). It was January. Winter in England. In Miami it was 75°F. A semi-dry season between two moments synonymous with the neon city: Art Basel Miami Beach pulls in the rich for a week in December. Spring break attracts the young to Florida. It's aptly captured in Harmony Korine’s film ‘Spring Breakers’, in which the voice of Faith (Selena Gomez) is heard over images of drunken, drug-fuelled, sexed-up teenagers, semi-naked at beach parties: ‘I'm starting to think this is the most spiritual place I've ever been’. The …

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Tyler Brûlé, or someone that looks remarkably like him from the rear is holding a glass of something that looks remarkably like rosé, and clutching something that looks remarkably like a Blackberry, close to the bar in the downstairs restaurant at the Grand Ferdinand.

He’s listening to two of the guests at this evening’s function, where the group congregating at the entrance to the hotel, beneath the Lobmeyr chandeliers, have swelled and spilled into the bar area and the main restaurant. There, tables of white linen await, laid with Wiener Silbermanufaktur cutlery. This figure, who might be Tyler Brûlé, wears a navy blazer, jeans and loafers. If it is him there is likely to be a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust clamped to the wrist beneath the cuff of that blue-and-white striped shirt. He has seldom been without it since buying the watch in Switzerland in 1983. The two men with him are talking to impress, convince or sell, and the man that might be Ty…

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The fictional literary genius and playwright Margot Tenenbaum is the reason I’m in Barcelona for the first time in twenty-three years.

During my visit in 1992 I had the pallor and the smoking-habit of the Wes Anderson creation from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but not the mink and the missing fingertip. I spent that holiday with my Walkman headphones clamped to my ears listening to a demo from a band called Suede: ‘Won't someone give me a gun/Oh well it’s for my brother’. Days later, back home in England my brother died prematurely, while in his thirties. In hindsight that sequence of events and what followed had the hallmarks of the prologue from a Wes Anderson project. ‘The Royal Tenenbaums starts with a bomb going off. The rest of the story takes place in the wreckage’, says the critic Matt Zoller Seitz author of ‘The Wes Anderson Collection’. In Barcelona now, years after witnessing how death can disfigure a family as surely as a parental divorce fract…

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It seemed fitting that a French doctor should ask me to provide a urine sample in a wine glass, this was Bordeaux after all. 

Being teetotal I was a philistine when it came to wine. I’d not visited a single vineyard during my stay, despite taking a break from the city centre and crossing the Garonne. Bordeaux was the latest of many solo trips too numerous to list, taken over many years.  The downside of travelling alone is illness. When you wake in the early hours with a searing pain in your side that becomes unbearable.  There is no one to comfort you or to complain to; no one to convince of how severe the crisis; no one to inject the morphine or insert the suppository. The pain started earlier in the day.  I was returning to Bordeaux after a break in the Dordogne. I slept throughout the train journey from Périgueux, and attributed a growing ache to the discomfort of the position I was seated in. It was Sunday and there were no buses between these t…

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One afternoon in the Autumn of 1979 a 17-year old Canadian science student stepped into the Fiorucci store on New York’s east 59th Street during a brief vacation.

The experience encouraged Douglas Coupland to ditch physics and embrace art on his return to Montreal. Decades later - now an author, an artist - he reflected on that first time at Fiorucci: ‘(It) was like one beautiful little crystallization of everything you wanted adulthood to be. It was sexy, it was pop, it was fast, it was kind of electric.’ The artifact that had such an impact was the one thing he could afford: a postcard image of Twiggy with kohl eyes, pigtails, dressed in the leopard print once synonymous with Elsa Schiaparelli that Fiorucci made its own.

The following year there was an earthquake in Italy. Not on the scale of the Messina Strait tragedy, but a rumble south of Naples that registered 6.89 on the richter scale. For those shallow enough to notice - me for one - there …

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