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" Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views. "

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" Imagine a State occasion where the Queen is wearing trainers with her tiara because she thinks it will make people like her better, more folksy. It's unthinkable. But that's patently the thought process Gordon Brown (or his spin doctor) went through before the Prime Minister appeared on the world stage in Beijing without his suit and tie. "

Peter York

World

Doctor

People

" I'm certainly not a person who spends their every waking moment soaking themselves in signs and signals of the sort that cult studies people study; and it's partly, I suppose, because some of those signs and signals aren't worth bothering about. You have to be selective about these things. "

" When I hear about something allegedly happening in the world I always ask: 'Who is doing it?' Trends break out because they're based on real demographics, like there being fewer nuclear families or more people living alone. If 10 people in Shoreditch are doing it, it's a 10-minute fad. "

" Fashion people think that the careful Nice companies are boring beyond measure. (Nice people think fashionistas look silly and should Get A Life). "

" Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz's 'Expresso Bongo' of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic. "

" It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views. "

" The newsprint thesp celebrity interview as a middle-brow art form suffers from desperate overproduction. There'll be at least 10 in the broadsheets today and every Sunday hereafter. "

" The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way. "

" One should never learn from one's mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure. "

" I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order. "

" 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 them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost. "

" 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, providing employment for thousands. Celebrities are instant brands. "

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

" All brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or 'masstige' ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top. "

" 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 mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill. "

" Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video. "

" The White Company offers its loyalists an altogether better, whiter world. The White people have edited out any colours that aren't white, off-white, milk chocolate, grey, taupe or black. They can't be doing with Johnnie Boden's cheery Sloane jokes, his spots and stripes, his occasional 'if it's me, it's U' loud colours. "

" There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit. "

" There are pop managers, and then there's Simon Cowell, who isn't gay, Jewish or particularly riveting. He's not without interest but he doesn't exactly have the hinterland of, say, Brian Epstein. "

" Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.' "

" All I'm saying is that Louis Vuitton and L'Oreal didn't invent branding at some point in the mid-Eighties. Big, reassuring names have been around a long time. "

" I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a '70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types. "

" George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s). "

" 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 - because they simply don't know about its existence or they don't know how it operates. "

" Across the Atlantic, commercial therapy of all kinds provides so many more comfortable outlets for people when they are under pressure. The English tradition is to get a grip, whereas the American version is to get in touch with your feelings, to say: 'I'm a good person. Isn't it terrible when bad things happen to people like me?' "

" Stephen Jones' hats are what we used to call 'creations'; extravagant, odd things for extravagant, odd people like Madonna or Lady Gaga. They're worn in a parallel universe. "

Peter York

Hats

Lady

" By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties. "

" Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them. "

" Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hippy sensibility to bear. Buyers saw the brand as saying 'all-natural, organic and Fairtrade.' "

" By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time. "