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New Infiniti Q30 2015 review

Infiniti has been trying to establish itself as the alternative luxury brand for some time now, but despite its best efforts, hasn’t exactly shaken up the market just yet. However, its new British-built Q30 compact hatchback – a first for…

Peugeot 308 GTi review

There’s more choice than ever in the hot hatchback class – alongside this new Peugeot 308 GTi, Renaultsport’s Megane 275 Trophy has been released, Honda massaged 306bhp out of the new Civic Type R and Ford will break new ground…

New Range Rover Evoque SE Tech 2016

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. That’s certainly the philosophy Land Rover has applied to the new Evoque. Only now, almost five years since the baby Range Rover was first launched, has the brand decided to update it. But…

Audi Q7 e-tron 2015 review

This is the plug-in hybrid Audi Q7 e-tron. Everyone’s at it: from pioneers Nissan to latecomers like Volvo, almost every manufacturer has an electric or hybrid model in its range. It comes as no surprise, then, that Audi’s e-tron family…

Ford F-150 Raptor 2017

Truck enthusiasts and journalist alike have long swooned over the Ford F-150 Raptor. Introduced in 2010, the Raptor proved Ford could make a Baja trophy truck and sell it to the average Joe. First equipped with the old 5.4-liter V-8…

On oat flour and elephant garlic

While not coeliac, I am wheat-/gluten-sensitive, yet I can tolerate porridge oats. Having lived in Australia for many years, I enjoyed oat bread, but can’t find it here. I’d bake my own if I could only get oat flour and…

Do ‘superfoods’ really exist?

In the early 1990s, a cookbook called Superfoods appeared in the bookshops. It was co-written by the alternative medicine practitioner, Michael Van Straten, who is one of a handful of people said to have coined what has become one of…

Summer prawn salad

This is a lovely fresh, crunchy salad with a hint of spice. You can substitute the prawns with crayfish meat, which is delicious and sweet, and should be cheaper too. Good delis and fishmongers stock it: opt for fresh UK-caught…

Make your own bacon

Buying bacon’s a lottery. There’s no telling the quality of pork that went into it, or the quantity of water added to bulk it out. If you want something that’s guaranteed to please, you’ll have to make it yourself. Start…

How to eat a persimmon

Our fruit bowls are becoming more adventurous. Having embraced the kiwi, the mango and the pomegranate we are now, it seems, passionate about persimmons. Supermarkets including Asda reported sales of the yellowy-orange, usually tomato-shaped fruits more than doubled last year…

Cornish blue: the greatest of cheese

General de Gaulle is famously said to have remarked of France “How can you govern a country that produces 246 varieties of cheeses?” The same can probably be said of Britain these days, and one of those cheeses, Cornish blue,…

Why walking is good for you

Pilates, yoga and the classic treadmill get all the attention when it comes to popular ways to stay healthy. There is, however, a more unassuming workout that might not get the column inches, but has all the benefits: walking. Certified…

Vampire of the uplands

At first I thought it was a thorn from a rose. I ran my hand up the back of my calf and could feel it caught in my skin. Something small, sticking out, it could be flicked back and forth…

How to cure my allergy

It was an egg biryani that started it. I had spent Easter hooked up to an intravenous drip in India – after a curry turned out to be housing a potent strain of E coli – and left the hospital…

Eat, drink and be … healthy?

It is a bright, autumnal Tuscan morning. Woodsmoke rises poker-straight into the sky, the village church jangles the quarter-hours and green-cloaked hills wrap the horizon. I’m in the walled garden of my private villa – vine pergola to the right,…