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Lake Como is a wonderfully ostentatious playground for the obscenely rich and glamorous. But beyond the pizazz there is rustic, mysterious charm; even for those without the personal GDP of a small Pacific island. It’s easy to imagine Lake Como as a Knighstbridge-on-the-lake. A soulless den of laundered money pumped into multi-million pound villas, ghostly-empty for most of the year. An area seemingly only suitable for day-trippers and the hyper-rich. But, like Knightsbridge, there’s a reason people want to hide...

If you’re going to insist on opening a restaurant specialising in one specific dish, it’s a matter of good manners to do that one thing properly. As a result, I’m constantly flummoxed at the news of so many London steakhouses celebrating double-figure anniversaries. To order a steak in a non-specialist restaurant can seem like a cop out; generally included on menus as the sole reserve of the unadventurous, “well-done please”, picky eater. But when done well, in the right setting,...

Do you have what it takes to start up a new business? - Try our quiz below. These top 20 challenges that a study of 500 entrepreneurs found were the toughest to conquer for a new business. Nearly one-fifth of those polled said they worked a minimum of 13-hours every day in their first year of setting up their business, with seven per cent slaving away for 16 hours or more every day. One entrepreneur confessed the hardest thing about...

French drama Custody (original title Jusqu'à la garde) opens with mother Miriam (Léa Drucker) and father Antoine (Denis Ménochet) arguing over Antoine's rights to see his two children. Initially there is a level of sympathy for Antoine, and an audience can question whether he is being unfairly maligned by a seemingly dislikable mother. I was also reminded of the issues of tit for tat arguments in a family court between parents, with what is the truth being a matter of...

Not Just Another Self Help Book – The Legacy of Crystal Island An experienced therapist has combined people’s love of fantasy fiction novels with a real desire for self-understanding and improvement in a bid to write anything but another self-help book. The Legacy of Crystal Island is the first in a trilogy of books by author and renowned therapist Colleen O’ Flaherty-Hilder which will explore the human mind and the way we can be conditioned into what we think and...

High concept was a buzzword in 90s Hollywood, and they don’t get much higher than Indecent Proposal’s. David and Diana (Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore) are high school sweethearts who have been pretty happily married for seven years. Things seem to be going well; she’s in real estate, he’s an architect and they’ve just started building their dream house. Then the recession hits and, down to a borrowed $5000 and with the bank calling in the loan and about to...

Watching kettles boil, waiting for buses and standing in line at the post office - it all adds up in the end to a considerable chunk of wasted time! The average Brit spends the equivalent of more than TWO YEARS of their lives 'killing time', it has emerged. Researchers found we typically waste 42 minutes a day waiting for everything from friends to buses and trains. Standing in a queue at the supermarket and sitting in traffic also leave us...

Clueless Brits don’t know their Maewyns from their miracles when it comes to the patron saints of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it has emerged. A study revealed gaps in Brits’ collective knowledge surrounding the UK’s patron saints ahead of this weekend's St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Just nine per cent of Brits knew St. Patrick's birth name – Maewyn Succat - with 35 per cent mistakenly attributing the moniker to the patron saint of Wales who is actually St. David....

The tycoon wants is part of a growing number of 'try-before-they-buy' tenants living in London