Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson

Rebel without a cause. Robinson has spent the past five years working in luxury print and publishing. This we feel may have jaded him slightly. When he isn't heading up the magazines publishing team, he can be found on piste, on track or off road.

Automotive

Drive Southwest

By

It’s a mystery to me why more people don’t realise that you can hire a supercar in the UK. Day after day, petrol-heads squeeze themselves into a special helmet two sizes too small and drive a few laps around a local track on an ‘experience day’. As if it wasn’t bad enough that you are wearing a helmet, you are given an instructor to glare at you every time you change gear or push the car over 60. As if you need the helmet; you’re never going to hit a speed that would be likely to do any damage. Suffice to say, you are much better off hiring a sports…

Automotive

Aston Martin DB9

By

Aston Martin has always held a special place in my heart. As a boy, I remember watching Timothy Dalton drive across Arctic tundra in the V8 Vantage Volante, being chased by the Ruskies. Times have changed, though, and the Iron Curtain has fallen. This issue, we couldn’t be further from tundra. This quarter, I convinced the ladies and gents at the hallowed Aston Martin Lagonda head office to loan us their new V12 DB9 Volante for an epic drive from Bristol to Antibes. The last time I drove across Europe was in a One Series BMW, following a team of 110 Defenders from Copenhagen to Monaco on the Gumball Rally….

Property, Travel

Villa Sandryon

By

The resort town, or commune, of Antibes is probably best known as one of high society’s original summer retreats. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Picasso, Marlene Dietrich, and Scott Fitzgerald were all enamoured by the Jewel of the Cote d’Azur, located half way between Nice and Cannes. In the 1930s, the Antibes region and, more specifically, Juan-Les-Pins was regarded as a bolthole for the international jet-set, casinos, nightclubs and white beaches stretching out as far as your monocle could see. Some 80 years later, and whilst the former lodgings of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Chateau la Croe, has like many regency buildings, fallen to the Oligarch, Juan-Les-Pans…

Travel

Le Richemond

By

Located across from the Square des Alpes, Le Richemond sits in pride of place on the banks of Lake Geneva. We arrived on a quiet Saturday evening, sat-nav fully deployed in the DB9. If, like me, Geneva is a mere stop-off destination before heading for the alps, it really should be given the respect it deserves. Now, I cannot work out if we arrived slightly off centre in regards to which side of the road we should be on, or if we went down a one-way street. Either way, anyone coming face-to-face with an Aston Martin DB9 tends to give way, especially in Geneva. It turns out we needn’t have…

Cars

Maserati GranTurismo

By

I don’t think I have ever looked so good stepping out of something. Walking out of business class from LHR to JFK is a close second, but even then you know you’re heading into passport control with the great unwashed. The Maserati Gran Turismo Sport lives in the rarefied atmosphere of the layer cake. My first real super car experience was a jaunt across nonchalant France in a California a few years ago. Paris, Bordeaux and Le Mans were all taken in over the space of a week and it really forged my appreciation for the marque. We would only have two real days with the Maserati and so like…

Culture, Travel

Art of Flight

By

On my first ski trip, what seems like millennia ago, my friends insisted that we watch Art of Flight. It was a right of passage they said. Sure there were plenty of other cult boarding films out there. But art of flight was really pushing the boundaries. You try carrying five 4K cameras weighing in at 60 pounds a piece into back country. The staff at The Review are always interested in alternative investment opportunities and film is one that is sure to be with us for a long time to come. Cinematography is an art form, one of the last few vestiges that has a trade craft. Taking that…

Time

40,000 Leagues

By

Given that orange is one of the most visible colours in the spectrum, it makes sense that Alpina’s new Extreme Diver 300 timepiece features the colour heavily. I’m not a diver. I scuba a little and snorkel when I can, but 300 metres? No need. I can, however, appreciate a fine timepiece, and as the weather in our usually-cold-and-wet little country seems to be doing us proud, why not consider one just for the sheer hell of looking good. The new Extreme Diver collection features a three-hand auto and mid-size quartz. The range is indeed designed for professional divers. It has a serious bezel, an adjustable strap to go over…

Food & Drink, Travel

Jumeirah

By

When you park your marque in the Jumeirah Carlton Tower’s underground bunker, you pass Phantom nestled next to Ferrari, tucked in beside Aston. It might as well be a private car club. In hindsight, we probably should have let the concierge park our pool car though. However, at the time, a white Ferrari FF was arriving with the usual pomp and ceremony from a well-honed door staff. This is Kensington at its most seductive. The gold gilt and mahogany lobby is refined and unassuming, the staff polite and courteous, with personality too. This makes a change from the usual robotic gofers you find at many London hotels. Having checked in,…

Travel

The Lancaster Hotel

By

Do you remember 1966? Can you tell me one thing that happened that year that doesn’t involve words, football or Germany? Labour won the election, that’s about all I can remember and I wasn’t even born. I’m pretty sure my mother was still an infant. That’s less a comment about how young I am, you understand, and more about how young my dear mother was when she brought me into this world. Words by Peter J Robinson It is also the year that TP Bennett Architects completed an eighteen-story office block opposite Hyde Park. There is nothing that makes English Heritage want to attach a blue plaque more than precast…

Interviews

In Memoriam

By

If you were to compile some of the most famous interviews of the 20th Century, no doubt John Lennon interviewed by Jann S Wenner, Marlon Brando by Truman Capote and Malcolm X by Alex Haley would all feature high in the list. But none have made an impact on the collective psyche as much as Sir David Frost’s interview with President Richard Nixon. In honour of the passing of Sir David Paradine Frost, OBE, we bring you one of Sir David’s last interviews – with Peter J Robinson in 2012. Some two years ago, I decided that a new magazine that we were preparing to launch needed a big name,…

Automotive

Austin Healey 3000

By

My understanding of the classic car world could be described as entry level at best. It begins with the classing system. I assume that if it comes with colour-coordinated driving gloves and requires a checklist to start it, you can class it as a classic. Apparently not. Antique means it was built somewhere between 1880 and 1930. The pre-war, war and post-war classifications speak for themselves. Then we have classic from the late-50s to mid-80s. Having probably given one era too many years, I fully expect the Bristol owners club to organise a very slow picket outside my apartment, ending with a drive for scones somewhere. Ok, let’s give the…

Automotive

Camaro

By

When Cheverolet put the Camaro on sale in September of 1966, the SR-71 Blackbird was flying at Mach 3 over mother Russia, The Beatles were apparently more famous than the son of god and wooden-toothed Walt Disney sadly popped his clogs. The 60s were a time of psychedelic drugs, JFK, civil-rights and a cultural counter revolution; a time that I would be hard pressed not to spin the dial to, if old Doc Brown turned up the in DeLorean. So, whilst America was on its way to a decade of societal change, so was the automotive industry.When Ford released the Mustang in 1964, there was no serious reaction from GM….

Automotive, Culture, Interviews

15th Anniversary Gumball Rally

By

I remember being 16 years old it was a suitably dull day in my home town so i decided to head into town and loiter as the rest of the youths did. The loitering led to boredom so some twenty minutes later i found myself in GAME purchasing a copy of Gumball3000 for the PS2. A fast paced game that involved driving a range of different vehicles across various countries whilst trying not to crash or get nicked by the eastern European rozzers. This year we were asked by the team at Twisted Land Rover if we should like to join them on the 15 year anniversary of the Gumball Rally travelling…

Culture

Up in Smoke

By

One night in 1961, shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was planning one final, covert action in mainland Cuba. An action, he assumed, that would go slightly more smoothly than the last CIA funded effort. Two years earlier, in 1959, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro came to power and began the process of seizing all foreign property, businesses and land, using the newly created ministry for the recovery of misappropriated assets. Many of the seized assets were American-owned. In response to this, the US administration attempted and failed at numerous covert ground-based guerrilla-tactics, attempting to overthrow the newly created communist party in Cuba. As Fidel Castro struggled…

Property, Travel

Andermatt – Summer in the mountains

By

It’s bittersweet, really. On the one hand, the weather is always going to be much more agreeable than here in Blighty. Their green and luscious meadows are filled with Swiss chocolate and beer, and you can slip in and out of your banker’s office in Geneva en route. On the other hand, there is no snow. Well, not none – there is some at the top, up by the pointy bit of the mountain, but you can’t really ski on it. Not just because it is wildly dangerous, but also because it is frowned upon by the authority-obliging Swiss. No matter how hard I try, I stare up at the…