Latest news with #Esprit
Auto Car
05-07-2025
- Automotive
- Auto Car
Toasting 50 years of the Lotus Esprit with... a garden party?
'Dad was always looking forward. He saw what other companies were doing and wanted to raise Lotus's game,' he replies. 'We had gone from the Elan to the Esprit, but this extraordinary car still had (the Elan's) handling characteristics… so you had your foot in both camps.' Wandering around the gathered Esprits gives you a measure of how Lotus sweated the model for all it was worth with, by my reckoning, 22 derivatives produced during its life – possibly even more. As well as the S1s, all the models from different designers are represented – X180 (Peter Stevens), S4 (Julian Thomson) and last-of-line V8 (Russell Carr) – plus special editions like the black and gold Esprit JPS and blue, red and silver Esprit Essex, both referencing Lotus's F1 ties. And what do we find in the manor's swimming pool? Naturally, James Bond's Esprit sub – aka 'Wet Nellie' – from the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me. In fact, it's what looks to be a half-scale model, with the actual full-sized prop at the poolside, in front of the Turbo Esprit from the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only. As I leave the event, heads are turned towards Giugiaro, who is now sitting in an S1 parked next to Lotus's 2024 Theory 1 concept car. In 50 years' time, I only hope that car will prove as influential to Lotus's future as the Esprit was in 1975.
The Age
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Sweet Valley High taught me all about love – except for one key detail
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. While I was still wearing skinny jeans and a pale pink Esprit jumper to primary school, he had graduated to grey flannel shorts, a pale grey shirt and a grey blazer with the arms pushed up. You'd think dressing entirely in grey would have dampened his look, but somehow it didn't. With golden curls and a flashing smile that I'd only witnessed from a distance, he was perfect teen magazine material. He never spoke to me directly, but his brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing. Around the time I developed my crush, I discovered the Sweet Dreams book series. If it was the sealed monthly Dolly Doctor column that taught me all I needed to know about sex, it was Sweet Dreams and later, Sweet Valley High that taught me all I needed to know about love. Sure, it was the sort of love that only 16-year-old American girls with flawless skin, perfect hair and eyes that sparkled ever experienced, but I was happy to pretend. And pretend I did. Writing about all the ways my crush would save me when the horse I was riding in the bush bucked me off. The fact that I didn't own a horse, or ever ride alone in the bush, didn't deter my fantasy life. The first Sweet Dreams book was published in 1981, and I found it a year or so later in the mobile library van. Called P.S. I Love You, it's the only title in the 233-book series without a happy ending, making it my favourite. Romance was one thing, but sobbing over the impossibility of romance was even better. The story of 16-year-old Mariah, who is dragged unwillingly to Palm Springs for the summer with her single mother and younger sister, was a heady read for a 12-year-old. Mariah is openly scathing of the rich families in Palm Springs until she meets the boy next door, who happens to be loaded, lovely and dying. This book cemented my obsession with romance, while also making me terrified that the boy of my dreams would discover a cancerous lump in his neck, too. The Sweet Dreams books were mostly standalone romances, written by different American authors. The covers used portrait photographs of teenage girls who I wanted to look like but never did, including Courteney Cox on the cover of The Last Word. The protagonists were always beautiful, and the teenage boys they fell for equally so. And if the girls didn't start out that way, then they quickly transformed, losing any necessary weight and overcoming their shyness. These worlds excluded anyone who wasn't the right size, race or look. By the time the Sweet Valley High series appeared two years later, I'd moved onto another crush. One who actually knew my name. We were in the same class and I used his library card when I wanted to borrow more romance books than I was allowed. We didn't really talk, but I did practise writing his name over and over again in my best bubble writing. Written by Francine Pascal and her army of ghostwriters, the Sweet Valley High series became a sort of bible for my generation. Sure, the protagonists were 'perfect size six' identical twins with 'sun-streaked blonde hair' and 'blue-green eyes the colour of the ocean' who shared a Jeep and lived in a mansion, but we still managed to see ourselves in Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Jessica was the impulsive and reckless twin, who frequently made questionable choices, while Elizabeth was older (by four minutes) wiser, more reserved and born with a conscience. Where the Sweet Dreams series was almost entirely focused on finding love, Sweet Valley High attempted something slightly different. Crushes, boys and romance were still at the centre, but the books also delved into the minutiae of high school life. And while Sweet Valley High School was nothing like my outer-suburban school, we did share many of the same concerns. We gossiped over break-ups, traded crushes, drank underage at parties, fought and made up with friends and talked about love like there was nothing else to talk about. Nothing was out of bounds for the writers of Sweet Valley High. Conceived like a soap opera, the books tackled everything from kidnapping to cults, cocaine deaths to comas, paralysis to underage drinking, and I loved it all. Sadly, none of the boys I had crushes on while I was reading Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High seemed to feel the same. Or if they did, their feelings remained as buried as mine. But the books gave me company while I was trying to work out how to behave and how to feel, at a time when hormones were wreaking havoc. Remembering what reading romance books meant to me when I was 12 and 13, I decided to write my own version of a romantic comedy for younger readers. I've published many books for readers aged 11-plus, but mostly they have been stories tinged with sadness, and I wanted to write something hopeful and gentle. For research, I reread some of the titles in both series. P.S. I Love You no longer made me cry, but the horror of Elizabeth's diary being stolen by a boy at school and used against her in The Stolen Diary did make me check my teenage diary was still hidden away. The books haven't aged particularly well – it was the height of diet culture in the 1980s, after all. But what they did do, and what I suspect I, and millions of others responded to, was to centre the importance of taking a teenager's emotions seriously. So often we dismiss the young as having foolish crushes or feelings that aren't worthy of conversation, but I still remember how I felt about that boy in his grey school uniform and how I longed for him to see me. Loading My new book is not angst-ridden like a Sweet Dream s romance, or soapie like a Sweet Valley High. It is the story of dual protagonists, Sonny and Tess, both nearly 14, who meet outside a fish and chip shop, and develop a mutual crush. It was important to me to write both perspectives, in a way to counter the absence of a boy's voice in the books that educated me as a teen. I want my young readers to see that we all have messy and confusing feelings when love strikes, and that it's not up to a boy to rescue a girl when her horse bucks her off in the bush, but that the girl can do rescuing too.
Sydney Morning Herald
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The books I loved as a teen have dated, but they got one thing right
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. While I was still wearing skinny jeans and a pale pink Esprit jumper to primary school, he had graduated to grey flannel shorts, a pale grey shirt and a grey blazer with the arms pushed up. You'd think dressing entirely in grey would have dampened his look, but somehow it didn't. With golden curls and a flashing smile that I'd only witnessed from a distance, he was perfect teen magazine material. He never spoke to me directly, but his brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing. Around the time I developed my crush, I discovered the Sweet Dreams book series. If it was the sealed monthly Dolly Doctor column that taught me all I needed to know about sex, it was Sweet Dreams and later, Sweet Valley High that taught me all I needed to know about love. Sure, it was the sort of love that only 16-year-old American girls with flawless skin, perfect hair and eyes that sparkled ever experienced, but I was happy to pretend. And pretend I did. Writing about all the ways my crush would save me when the horse I was riding in the bush bucked me off. The fact that I didn't own a horse, or ever ride alone in the bush, didn't deter my fantasy life. The first Sweet Dreams book was published in 1981, and I found it a year or so later in the mobile library van. Called P.S. I Love You, it's the only title in the 233-book series without a happy ending, making it my favourite. Romance was one thing, but sobbing over the impossibility of romance was even better. The story of 16-year-old Mariah, who is dragged unwillingly to Palm Springs for the summer with her single mother and younger sister, was a heady read for a 12-year-old. Mariah is openly scathing of the rich families in Palm Springs until she meets the boy next door, who happens to be loaded, lovely and dying. This book cemented my obsession with romance, while also making me terrified that the boy of my dreams would discover a cancerous lump in his neck, too. The Sweet Dreams books were mostly standalone romances, written by different American authors. The covers used portrait photographs of teenage girls who I wanted to look like but never did, including Courteney Cox on the cover of The Last Word. The protagonists were always beautiful, and the teenage boys they fell for equally so. And if the girls didn't start out that way, then they quickly transformed, losing any necessary weight and overcoming their shyness. These worlds excluded anyone who wasn't the right size, race or look. By the time the Sweet Valley High series appeared two years later, I'd moved onto another crush. One who actually knew my name. We were in the same class and I used his library card when I wanted to borrow more romance books than I was allowed. We didn't really talk, but I did practise writing his name over and over again in my best bubble writing. Written by Francine Pascal and her army of ghostwriters, the Sweet Valley High series became a sort of bible for my generation. Sure, the protagonists were 'perfect size six' identical twins with 'sun-streaked blonde hair' and 'blue-green eyes the colour of the ocean' who shared a Jeep and lived in a mansion, but we still managed to see ourselves in Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Jessica was the impulsive and reckless twin, who frequently made questionable choices, while Elizabeth was older (by four minutes) wiser, more reserved and born with a conscience. Where the Sweet Dreams series was almost entirely focused on finding love, Sweet Valley High attempted something slightly different. Crushes, boys and romance were still at the centre, but the books also delved into the minutiae of high school life. And while Sweet Valley High School was nothing like my outer-suburban school, we did share many of the same concerns. We gossiped over break-ups, traded crushes, drank underage at parties, fought and made up with friends and talked about love like there was nothing else to talk about. Nothing was out of bounds for the writers of Sweet Valley High. Conceived like a soap opera, the books tackled everything from kidnapping to cults, cocaine deaths to comas, paralysis to underage drinking, and I loved it all. Sadly, none of the boys I had crushes on while I was reading Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High seemed to feel the same. Or if they did, their feelings remained as buried as mine. But the books gave me company while I was trying to work out how to behave and how to feel, at a time when hormones were wreaking havoc. Remembering what reading romance books meant to me when I was 12 and 13, I decided to write my own version of a romantic comedy for younger readers. I've published many books for readers aged 11-plus, but mostly they have been stories tinged with sadness, and I wanted to write something hopeful and gentle. For research, I reread some of the titles in both series. P.S. I Love You no longer made me cry, but the horror of Elizabeth's diary being stolen by a boy at school and used against her in The Stolen Diary did make me check my teenage diary was still hidden away. The books haven't aged particularly well – it was the height of diet culture in the 1980s, after all. But what they did do, and what I suspect I, and millions of others responded to, was to centre the importance of taking a teenager's emotions seriously. So often we dismiss the young as having foolish crushes or feelings that aren't worthy of conversation, but I still remember how I felt about that boy in his grey school uniform and how I longed for him to see me. Loading My new book is not angst-ridden like a Sweet Dream s romance, or soapie like a Sweet Valley High. It is the story of dual protagonists, Sonny and Tess, both nearly 14, who meet outside a fish and chip shop, and develop a mutual crush. It was important to me to write both perspectives, in a way to counter the absence of a boy's voice in the books that educated me as a teen. I want my young readers to see that we all have messy and confusing feelings when love strikes, and that it's not up to a boy to rescue a girl when her horse bucks her off in the bush, but that the girl can do rescuing too.
The Age
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The books I loved as a teen have dated, but they got one thing right
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. While I was still wearing skinny jeans and a pale pink Esprit jumper to primary school, he had graduated to grey flannel shorts, a pale grey shirt and a grey blazer with the arms pushed up. You'd think dressing entirely in grey would have dampened his look, but somehow it didn't. With golden curls and a flashing smile that I'd only witnessed from a distance, he was perfect teen magazine material. He never spoke to me directly, but his brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing. Around the time I developed my crush, I discovered the Sweet Dreams book series. If it was the sealed monthly Dolly Doctor column that taught me all I needed to know about sex, it was Sweet Dreams and later, Sweet Valley High that taught me all I needed to know about love. Sure, it was the sort of love that only 16-year-old American girls with flawless skin, perfect hair and eyes that sparkled ever experienced, but I was happy to pretend. And pretend I did. Writing about all the ways my crush would save me when the horse I was riding in the bush bucked me off. The fact that I didn't own a horse, or ever ride alone in the bush, didn't deter my fantasy life. The first Sweet Dreams book was published in 1981, and I found it a year or so later in the mobile library van. Called P.S. I Love You, it's the only title in the 233-book series without a happy ending, making it my favourite. Romance was one thing, but sobbing over the impossibility of romance was even better. The story of 16-year-old Mariah, who is dragged unwillingly to Palm Springs for the summer with her single mother and younger sister, was a heady read for a 12-year-old. Mariah is openly scathing of the rich families in Palm Springs until she meets the boy next door, who happens to be loaded, lovely and dying. This book cemented my obsession with romance, while also making me terrified that the boy of my dreams would discover a cancerous lump in his neck, too. The Sweet Dreams books were mostly standalone romances, written by different American authors. The covers used portrait photographs of teenage girls who I wanted to look like but never did, including Courteney Cox on the cover of The Last Word. The protagonists were always beautiful, and the teenage boys they fell for equally so. And if the girls didn't start out that way, then they quickly transformed, losing any necessary weight and overcoming their shyness. These worlds excluded anyone who wasn't the right size, race or look. By the time the Sweet Valley High series appeared two years later, I'd moved onto another crush. One who actually knew my name. We were in the same class and I used his library card when I wanted to borrow more romance books than I was allowed. We didn't really talk, but I did practise writing his name over and over again in my best bubble writing. Written by Francine Pascal and her army of ghostwriters, the Sweet Valley High series became a sort of bible for my generation. Sure, the protagonists were 'perfect size six' identical twins with 'sun-streaked blonde hair' and 'blue-green eyes the colour of the ocean' who shared a Jeep and lived in a mansion, but we still managed to see ourselves in Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Jessica was the impulsive and reckless twin, who frequently made questionable choices, while Elizabeth was older (by four minutes) wiser, more reserved and born with a conscience. Where the Sweet Dreams series was almost entirely focused on finding love, Sweet Valley High attempted something slightly different. Crushes, boys and romance were still at the centre, but the books also delved into the minutiae of high school life. And while Sweet Valley High School was nothing like my outer-suburban school, we did share many of the same concerns. We gossiped over break-ups, traded crushes, drank underage at parties, fought and made up with friends and talked about love like there was nothing else to talk about. Nothing was out of bounds for the writers of Sweet Valley High. Conceived like a soap opera, the books tackled everything from kidnapping to cults, cocaine deaths to comas, paralysis to underage drinking, and I loved it all. Sadly, none of the boys I had crushes on while I was reading Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High seemed to feel the same. Or if they did, their feelings remained as buried as mine. But the books gave me company while I was trying to work out how to behave and how to feel, at a time when hormones were wreaking havoc. Remembering what reading romance books meant to me when I was 12 and 13, I decided to write my own version of a romantic comedy for younger readers. I've published many books for readers aged 11-plus, but mostly they have been stories tinged with sadness, and I wanted to write something hopeful and gentle. For research, I reread some of the titles in both series. P.S. I Love You no longer made me cry, but the horror of Elizabeth's diary being stolen by a boy at school and used against her in The Stolen Diary did make me check my teenage diary was still hidden away. The books haven't aged particularly well – it was the height of diet culture in the 1980s, after all. But what they did do, and what I suspect I, and millions of others responded to, was to centre the importance of taking a teenager's emotions seriously. So often we dismiss the young as having foolish crushes or feelings that aren't worthy of conversation, but I still remember how I felt about that boy in his grey school uniform and how I longed for him to see me. Loading My new book is not angst-ridden like a Sweet Dream s romance, or soapie like a Sweet Valley High. It is the story of dual protagonists, Sonny and Tess, both nearly 14, who meet outside a fish and chip shop, and develop a mutual crush. It was important to me to write both perspectives, in a way to counter the absence of a boy's voice in the books that educated me as a teen. I want my young readers to see that we all have messy and confusing feelings when love strikes, and that it's not up to a boy to rescue a girl when her horse bucks her off in the bush, but that the girl can do rescuing too.
Euronews
23-06-2025
- Business
- Euronews
The Big Question: Is Amazon good for Europe's economy?
Amazon is often accused of causing the decline of high street retail, but is it really that simple? 2024 saw fashion brand Esprit close 56 stores in Germany, Ted Baker shut all of its 46 stores in the UK and Ireland, and Casino Group in France (owners of Casino, Monoprix, Naturalia and Franprix) shed 768 non-profitable outlets. Is this a sign of further closures to come? Vice President of EU stores at Amazon Mariangela Marseglia doesn't think so. In fact, she predicts 'a future where e-commerce and traditional commerce will coexist.' 'Customers are not either highstreet or e-commerce, they do both.' In this episode of The Big Question, Marseglia joins Euronews' Stefan Grobe to discuss the state of retail in Europe and Amazon's impact on the industry. Can e-commerce and high street retail coexist? Marseglia insisted that consumers still want both online and brick-and-mortar retail options, and the industry needs to continue catering to both. She credited online stores, like Amazon, as being a great way to source specialist or rare items which high street stores simply don't have the space to stock. 'When I started working at Amazon, I was managing the book business,' Marseglia recalled. 'And we offered, on our infinite shelves, millions and millions of books, including foreign language books and books hard to find. And normally, these items don't find a space in a regular bookstore, so it is really complementary to traditional retail.' Marseglia also cited UK supermarket Morrisons, who offer delivery through Amazon, and has seen it successfully coexist alongside both their physical shops and their own online delivery service. And Marseglia seems to live by her philosophy too. When asked where she chooses to shop on her days off, she admitted to buying many items from Amazon when she's busy, but delights in visiting her local market in Luxembourg to buy cooking ingredients from the region of Puglia in her home country, Italy. How are consumer shopping habits changing? Unsurprisingly, the cost of living crisis has had an enormous impact on the way Amazon's customers spend their money. 'What we are noticing is people being a little bit more conscious with their spending: buying more of everyday essentials, and maybe [taking their time with purchases] for goods that are more durable.' 'So instead of changing their washing machine every 10 years, it takes them a little longer. So they are postponing those types of purchases,' Marseglia added. 'They're much more interested in deals, for example. Deals events are becoming very popular, like our Prime Day or Black Friday. They tend to wait for those moments to kind of get great deals and save some money.' Is Amazon good for Europe's economy? 'Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the European economy" is the age-old phrase we hear again and again. According to Marseglia, there are over 127,000 European SMEs thriving on Amazon. 'We are not a killer. We are actually an ally, a catalyst for their growth,' she told The Big Question. 'Thanks to a company like Amazon, their job is simplified because we allow them, for example, to export to foreign countries in a very easy way.' Marseglia also proudly declared that Amazon contributed €41 billion to the bloc's GDP. That's roughly equivalent to the entire economy of Latvia or Estonia. However, she was critical that Europe is a harder place for businesses to survive than the US. 'The US market is one big single market. In Europe, I think we should do much more to strengthen Europe as a single market because the reality is that there is a tendency towards that, but we are still operating a little bit like 27 different marketplaces,' Marseglia explained. 'We can cope with that because we are big grownup guys. But I'm much more worried for the small companies that sell on our marketplace. For them it's much more difficult to cope with complicated legislation and different regulations, et cetera.' The Big Questionis a series from Euronews Business where we sit down with industry leaders and experts to discuss some of the most important topics on today's agenda. Watch the video above to see the full discussion with Mariangela Marseglia.
