I meet Guy Ritchie – the sometimes acclaimed, sometimes derided film director, ex-husband of Madonna, partial begetter of the sleek lifestyle-lad, designer-rogue culture that pervaded the UK in the mid to late-Nineties – in a pub, which turns out to be his pub. Lore of the Land is tucked away off Tottenham Court Road, three storeys of charmingly proportioned, immaculately renovated Victorian conviviality, cosy-poky with antique prints on Farrow & Ball-painted walls and original floorboards that creak and dip (“drunken”, Ritchie calls them). It smells like Sunday roast and good cheer.
What a beautiful pub, I say. “Thanks,” says Ritchie, who stands in its midst: 51 years old, chunkily handsome with a great deal of hair. This, then, is how I come to understand he
