You're never quite sure what you'll get with Will Self, but he's right about this

Despite the studied impression he gives as one of Britain's grumpiest old men, I know for a fact that the novelist Will Self is an entertaining, generous soul. His erudition and command of the English language are not in doubt: I usually need a dictionary at hand for a conversation with him, and he once seemed to have a one-man campaign to bring the word "plangent" (loud, with a plaintive sound) into common usage.

My earliest food memory… Collecting cherries, grapes, peaches and figs and eating them while they were still warm from the sun. My mother was Italian and I grew up just outside of Genoa. I remember being tiny, only about three years old, and being fascinated that when you snap a fig off the tree it oozes masses of sticky milk.

'I wish I'd never worn that prom dress'

Aim higher than Roses this Christmas. We’ve got perfect pralines and tempting truffles for chocoholics to enjoy...

My earliest food memory… I'll never forget my mother's instant noodles when I was growing up in New York. My mother's an awful cook so I ate a lot of bad food when I was young. It forced me to learn how to cook myself.

Giant jam sandwiches and silly sausage fights are ruining our beloved celebrity chefs

There’s a bloody row brewing in Westminster as restaurants hit back at council attempts to control the way burgers are served.

My earliest memory… Mum making bread. She made fresh bread every  day and the smell was just incredible.  I could live off warm crusty bread with butter and nothing else – it’s one of  life’s greatest pleasures.

The Spa

Last week, in describing the death of Glasgow’s most iconic urban cinema (it gave way, as most now have done, to a peripheral multiplex smelling of non-dairy butter substitute), I touched on the massive change in how we consume movies.

‘Everything I didn’t learn in the kitchen, I discovered by travelling the world’

The man who pays his way

How far would you go to prove that you had not become stuffy and predictable? That's one of the questions posed by Straight, D C Moore's entertaining rewrite of the 2009 US Indie movie, Humpday.