These hellish little poupées, writhing in purgatory on their cardboard mounts or thrown into wicker caskets, are not some macabre instillation by Jake and Dinos Chapman but instead just toys for sale at the Saturday market at sun-kissed and heavenly Antibes, on the French Riviera.

Q: What do you need for a sandcastle competition? A: A beach and an audience. So where better than the South Bank of London, where thousands of people promenade on the weekends, when the tide of the mighty Thames is low? There’s a beach, right there, with a view over to St Paul’s Cathedral. [...]

Heaven is doing this with Air Tahiti Nui, surely the most delightfully old-fashioned carrier in the air, which takes your mind off the fear of flying. You feel like you are in the tropics the minute you step aboard - the seats are lagoon blue and the pillows canary yellow. The meal service in business [...]

You need to be seriously cashed up to stay at Eichardt’s Private Hotel in Queenstown, the snow capital of the South Island of New Zealand. Eichardt’s has reclaimed the elegance of its Gold Rush days, but with a modern, comfortable twist. Downstairs, the cheery bar is the kind you wish existed more often, (great for [...]

For a stopover in Hong Kong, try the Lanson Place Hotel, in the newly groovy Causeway Bay area which mixes the new (Prada, LV, Gucci) with the old and there are also great little lunch spots and old tea shops.

The London art market is exploding and not just in the posh galleries of Cork Street. Such was the success of the guerilla gallery, Santa’s Ghetto, with work by the likes of graffiti artists Banksy and Jamie Hewlett, creator of virtual pop band Gorillaz and Tank Girl, that punters had to line up outside. Proclaiming [...]

The Tate Modern proved that slides aren’t just for children with their winter 2006 exhibition by Carsten Holler. It takes a strong spirit to launch oneself off a slide as high as this old power station’s towering Turbine Hall. Five slides, one from each gallery level and two from the bridge, turned art into child’s [...]

Commendably, Bekonscot, one of the world’s earliest and most loved model villages, has not tried to embrace modern times. Although additions are made to the village all the time, all are set in aspic, as if it were still Jolly Olde England in the 1930s. Back then, the young Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret loved [...]

The Statue of Liberty, designed by Bartholdi and built in Paris, was a gift from the French Republic to commemorate the centennial of America’s Declaration of Independence. The engineer for the colossal copper sculpture was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. The Statue of Liberty was completed in France in July, 1884 and arrived in New York Harbor [...]