Welcome to the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of Gentleman’s Journal — a 164-page romp through lovely watches, proper pork broths, excellent briefcases, classic cars, old Etonians, Alpine retreats, subterranean haunts, high-growth start ups, preternaturally gifted antiques dealers, and straightforward, straightforward shooting weekends.

It’s great fun. It answers all the burning questions of the day. Well, all the ones that don’t make you want to hide away in a mountain hut for the next decade (though we can offer those, too.) What are the future classic cars to invest in now? (The editor has a Range Rover p38 he’d love to chat to you about, actually). Is it possible to build the old Hollywood in New Jersey? What’s Chris Black’s favourite insult? Why is Charles Finch at war with the council? Which jet set playboy had the best summer home? And what advice might we give to Prince George during his first term at Eton? There are no easy answers here.

And in the middle, we have a special edition of our annual ‘Tastemakers’ index — this time dedicated solely to the shining city across the pond, New York. As the name suggests, it features thirty people with great taste who are actually making things — and spans writers, photographers, chefs, entrepreneurs, artists, comedians, designers, impressionists. They’re a talented lot, who (along with an excellent feature on the most exciting start ups in London right now) make us strangely optimistic about the power of human creativity and ingenuity in this funny old moment.

One of them is Tom Straker, the English chef who is now hoping to make his own mark on the New York scene with a new opening in SoHo, sitting in the handsome site once inhabited by Keith McNally’s Lucky Strike. “I’ve spoken to so many people and gathered this whole understanding of what it was,” Straker says now of his precursor, in an interview held just a few days before his raucous opening. “What kind of people went there and the mischief people got up to. I like mischief and I like people having a good time. So more of that, please.”

Mischief! That might be the chief spirit that inflects the issue-at-large, now we think of it — a rallying cry to remember to have fun, spend on the things you love, travel to far-flung places, drink good wine, eat excellent food (try the Fat Badger’s prawn dumplings!) and try in general to live The Good Life as the festive season shimmers into view.

As Emmet McDermott and Margot Hauer-King put it, in a lovely interview we did with them about their excellent New York venue People’s: “we want to bring back the butterflies…”