Tag Archives: Sunday Times

Paul Ewen Creates “Inspired Alter Ego” Francis Plug

Paul Ewen Creates “Inspired Alter Ego” Francis Plug

Paul Ewen, New Zealand born and raised writer, is getting rave reviews for his first novel about his fictional alter ego. Ewen, now based in London, has published his first novel, “Francis Plug: How to…

Biblical Proportions

Biblical Proportions

In his column for the UK Sunday Times, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson writes: “If you were God and you were all-powerful, you wouldn’t select Bethlehem as a suitable birthplace for your only child…

Velocity is Everything

Velocity is Everything

Business leaders have things the wrong way round according to New Zealand-based Kevin Roberts, chief executive worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi. They spend far too much time assessing information and making decisions,…

Most Influential Player Ever

Most Influential Player Ever

Jonah Lomu, “a defender’s worst nightmare” is “rugby’s ‘most influential’ figure the sport has ever seen”, taking the number one spot of Stephen Jones’ Top 2 Countdown in a 12-week series featured in The…

South Pacific

South Pacific

“A major new talent destined for greatness”. Samoan Jonathan Lemalu, continues to stun the UK music scene. As well as featuring on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, the bass baritone received the Young Artist Award…

Olympic gold for Barclay

Olympic gold for Barclay

Southland teenager Aaron Barclay has won gold in the men’s individual triathlon and silver with Australasian team-mate Maddie Dillon in the team race at the first Youth Olympic Games in Singapore. Barclay, 17, who…

Dining with the Birds

Dining with the Birds

For one month from 9 January until February 2009, in a redwood plantation north of Auckland, between Puhoi and Warkworth, and 10m up a tree, the Yellow House restaurant will serve three-course meals…

Winning Ways

Winning Ways

Former All Black captain Sean Fitzpatrick has been asked to take part in a one-on-one mentoring initiative with a group of young Scotland players. Fitzpatrick will be linked with Ross Ford, the present Scotland…

Tough Gets Going

Tough Gets Going

Sportswear apparel maker Canterbury of New Zealand, which produces the shirts worn by the Scottish Rugby Union team, will this week open its first retail outlet in Europe. Canterbury, which also supplies Glasgow Warriors,…

Flight from the Top

Flight from the Top

New Zealand world and Guinness record skydiver Wendy Smith was one of three daredevils to leap from an aircraft at a record height of 9000m in the skies above Mount Everest, free-falling for one minute…

Campbell’s Beginnings

Campbell’s Beginnings

Hawera-born, Brighton-based golfer Michael Campbell is eating bacon sandwiches at the Royal Ashdown Forest clubhouse in Sussex where he explains his golfing initiation in Taranaki. “I started playing on a local course where you…

Safety in Cyber-space

Safety in Cyber-space

New Zealand-designed educational software Hector’s World, which teaches children about the dangers of online aedophiles with cartoons, has been launched at St Vincent de Paul RC Primary School, in Westminster, Central London. Hector’s World…

Berkett Settles In

Berkett Settles In

Neil Berkett is eight weeks into his role as chief executive at Virgin Media and already has battle scars. Actually, he explains in an interview with Sunday Times reporter Andrew Davidson, he just banged…

Oram Fit for Lords

Oram Fit for Lords

Palmerston North Black Caps all-rounder Jacob Oram, 29, has recovered from stress-related injury and is braced for the first Test against England at Lords on May 15. Oram’s economy rate of 2.4 is the best among…

Ex-M16 Agent Gives Evidence

Ex-M16 Agent Gives Evidence

A former British secret service agent from Ngaruawahia has given evidence at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. Richard Tomlinson alleges that his former employer, M16, was responsible for the death…

Edge of the World (Cup) Musing

Edge of the World (Cup) Musing

The Rugby World Cup saw columnists muse on NZ’s evolving relationship with its (big) brotherly neighbour. SMH: “For those who’ve not noticed, New Zealand – a small nation off the east coast of…

Honey Sweet

Honey Sweet

New Zealand Manuka honey cures what ails you.

Brits take to New Girl

Brits take to New Girl

Emily Perkins’s The New Girl: “The atmosphere of summer, youth and restlessness in a social backwater is strong, as is the projection of Miranda’s intriguing personality and its effect on Julia, her brightest pupil….

Island Export

Island Export

Treasure Island, Survivor – love them or loathe them “reality” means ratings. With a patent on the format Treasure Island is a New Zealand export success for Touchstone Productions.

Bat to Beat All

Bat to Beat All

Best place to pick up a custom made stick to make sixes? New Zealand maker James Laver “just the sort of man one would want to make one’s bat”.

Tough Fight

Tough Fight

New Zealand Maori “arguably the most committed and technically sound rugby race on the planet” threaten world champions Australia on their home turf. Also, NZ Maori match a focus for Sydney’s Maori community.  

Intimacy and anguish

Intimacy and anguish

New Zealand actress Kerry Fox’s award-winning work in Intimacy continues to generate curiosity, awe and pursed lips: Getting Intimate in the Sunday Times; Truely, madly, explicitly in The Observer and Hanif…

Lindauer, Pick of the Bunch

Lindauer, Pick of the Bunch

Lindauer Special Reserve Brut rounds out the box in Taste for Wine’s Pick of the Bunch pre-mixed case designed to broaden the tastes of British wine-drinkers.

Return of the Jedi – More Cenus/Senseless Fun

Return of the Jedi – More Cenus/Senseless Fun

The New Zealand spawned Jedi-email just keeps going and going.

Billion dollar Bevan

Billion dollar Bevan

Bridget Jones producer Kiwi Tim Bevan nudges the billion dollar mark with Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and now Bridget Jones, due to be Britain’s biggest hit this year.

Wine Rewritten

Wine Rewritten

Leading Sancerre vintner Henri Bourgeois decamps to Marlborough to be part of the “the one new world country that has taken a classic French grape variety and rewritten the wine script”.  

Upside-down Edge

Upside-down Edge

A photograph of the New Zealand sky projected onto a mirror on the floor of the Glasgow School of Art “allows people to look down to see the sky, as if the earth were…

Memoirs from the Edge

Memoirs from the Edge

NZ-edged novelist Fay Weldon sits down to write her memoirs – “All they do is make you self-centered,” she says.

Groundbreaker Gov-Gen

Groundbreaker Gov-Gen

“As one of the few female law students of her generation,  Cartwright was barred from the Law Students association, denied access to textbooks and told she was only at university to find a husband.”…

Pinetree Growl

Pinetree Growl

“Colin Meads, the grim, great New Zealand lock, was once asked why British and Irish forwards were inferior to those produced by the southern hemisphere – especially the forbidding, beetle-browed men produced by New Zealand. “Too many…

More Finn Enough

More Finn Enough

“Life without a band suits Neil Finn – his second solo album is phenomenal”  

Rower Cola

Rower Cola

University of Otago scientists says caffeine consumption prior to exercise boosts output, making you rower faster, run further and jump higher without even realising it.

Elegant Astelia

Elegant Astelia

A New Zealand silver astelia adds elegance to Irish garden designer Dominick Murphy’s small garden.

Hollywood outgrows itself

Hollywood outgrows itself

Gladiator, filmed in Morocco, Malta and the UK, directed by a Brit, scored by a German and “sexed up by the hottest New Zealander on the planet” is a new breed of block-buster, a…

Headmaster Steps Down

Headmaster Steps Down

New Zealander John Lewis, the first non-British headmaster at Eton and the man who shielded Wills from the press, will resign in 18 months, at the age of 60.

Spy on Top

Spy on Top

Of the bestseller lists that is. New Zealander Richard Tomlinson’s account of his time with MI6, The Big Breach, proves popular despite legal wrangling over publishing and copyright.

America’s Cup Turns 150

America’s Cup Turns 150

“It would have felt very wrong to have hosted a celebration of the fact that we lost the cup in 1851, haven’t seen it since and are making no attempt to get it back,” says John…

Acting love

Acting love

British actor Toby Stephens “sips cranberry and soda in restaurants with his girlfriend, the New Zealand actress Anna-Louise Plowman (Flick, The Adulterer)”, and enjoys “choosing colour schemes for his new north London flat.” …

Fit to Judge?

Fit to Judge?

New Zealand research shows juries have “fairly fundamental” misunderstandings of the law in over 7% of cases.

Big Breach

Big Breach

Kiwi ex-MI6 operative Richard Tomlinson’s memoirs, The Big Breach hits Russian bookshops and are serialised in the Sunday Times, to the dismay of the secret service establishment in Britain.

Quicksilver Hebe

Quicksilver Hebe

Plant New Zealand hebe for a “calming, understated and very grown-up” look.

Baby Step

Baby Step

Researchers at Auckland University have uncovered a gene that may be linked to premature menopause, a condition that prevents up to 1% of women from bearing children.

Holiday high

Holiday high

New Zealander Russell Brice plans to build the world’s highest hotel – at base camp on Everest’s Tibetan flank. The hotel aims to be “a flagship of green construction techniques,” using solar power and…

A&LD rave

A&LD rave

“Ever find yourself overwhelmed by the mass of information the net makes available?” Make like those in the know and head to New Zealand (and the web’s) hottest site, Arts and Letters Daily.

Horsemen of the Edge

Horsemen of the Edge

“New Zealand horsemen have arrived in the village. They have taken over a surplus cowshed just behind the blacksmith’s. I visit and discover that, having seen better days, the shed is being converted with vast energy…

Tua Much

Tua Much

It wasn’t his destiny this time. Pre- and post-fight opinion on Tua-Lennox.Pre in the Sunday Times, New York Daily News, USA Today and the Scotsman. Tua’s toxic hair at News24. Post in Las Vegas Sun, New York and Daily News.

Rugger Scrum

Rugger Scrum

Recent south-north tests have created a scrum among sport journalist, players and coaches over playing style and rule reform SMH likes the running game, French coach describes losses as “no-brainers“, Welsh coach Kiwi Graham Henry has…

Miracle Flightless

Miracle Flightless

Since 1984, New Zealand has undergone “the most comprehensive economic reform programme undertaken by any OECD country in recent decades”. Not all the results have been bright: “Looking back over the past 15 years, you would have…

Kiwi Coach Conquers in Rowing Eights

Kiwi Coach Conquers in Rowing Eights

The Olympic eights were taken out by the British for the time in 88 years and it was a Kiwi who pushed them to their win. The team cited Harry Mahon, their assistant coach, as a…

Mr Parsons’ mystery

Mr Parsons’ mystery

New Zealand-born thriller writer Julie Parsons featured in a British TV series, True Lives. She was filmed returning to New Zealand, the scene of her father’s mysterious disappearance all those years before…

Top of the Pots

Top of the Pots

New Zealand plants have a distinctive look to them, and the tree-fern is perhaps one of the most unusual. Ponga trees are a hot item in the UK. Home Front TV gardener Diarmuid Gavin highlights them on…

Rugby: Brits Gush About All Blacks

Rugby: Brits Gush About All Blacks

“To watch the sheer brilliance of New Zealand’s opening passage of play against the Wallabies, and then to have that followed by the marvellous fightback which took Australia to level pegging—and for that quality to be sustained…

Thigh-deep in Flyfishing

Thigh-deep in Flyfishing

What does New Zealand have in common with Argentina, Russia and Alaska? No, not an “a” in the name – they’re all “flyfishing glamour spots”. Thomas McGuane chronicles his time standing thigh-deep in glamorous rivers in his new…

Flax: A Protective Edge

Flax: A Protective Edge

The Sunday Times garden columnist, Dan Pearson, gets all excited about Phorium tenax: New Zealand flax, or Harakeke. He’s found its adaptation to New Zealand’s harsh coasts makes it the perfect windbreak for a seaside garden…

Striking a Cool Note

Striking a Cool Note

The arts festival running concurrently with the games in Sydney features Vaughan William’s Sinfonia Antarctica performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, with narration by Sir Edmund Hillary.  

Peerless Mansfield in Chicago

Peerless Mansfield in Chicago

Katherine Mansfield’s intricate and beautiful stories continue to resonante around the world. “The New Zealand-born Mansfield, who died in 1923 at 34, was a peerless observer of the tiny spaces between joy and…