Kate Middleton’s a pretty girl who sounds nice.

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

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...

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 Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will...

Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts.

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...

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

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...

In Britain, eponymous lifestyle branding as we know it started in the late 1960s, with two fascinating families – the Conrans and the Ashleys – who in increasingly brilliant settings and catalogues sold rather different...

I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It’s an entirely caring thing; it’s not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs...

If beauty isn’t genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.

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...

There’s no Peter York Foundation, and you’re no one without one.