London clubland divides itself between the St James's refuge for toffs, and the Conquest of Cool, for the arts and media..

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture..

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buy….

Marmite - like that other little black-jar job, Bovril - is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel ad….

This may sound insulting to some of my cult studies friends, but there's a lot of cult studies people who ignore, shall we say, the wider canvas - be….

For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous colle….

Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick a….

Selling scent is a key job for celebrities. At any one time, there'll be hundreds of them at it, going on the world's talk shows, doing photo-shoots,….

Eponymous brands aren't that popular with analysts and investors now. You can only take an eponymous brand with a living figurehead so far, they argu….

My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mock….

People are fretful about lifestyle retailing because the idea that anyone's immortal soul and deepest longings can be quite so readily anticipated an….

The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important t….

Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans wh….

Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient t….

Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn't aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead..

In the 1940s, cigarettes would be shown in classy situations, endorsed by celebrities - real A-list Hollywood stars in America - the ads would make c….

Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz's 'Expresso Bong….

Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck the….

If you've done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We're absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we're not turning into….

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around e….

Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world..