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.

Prince William looks good in uniform and Man-at-Hackett black and white tie (he has grown up wearing it constantly); less certain in his suits, which sometimes look borderline archaic; and variable in casual. But completely...

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 thing was to have the books, not actually...

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

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...

I can’t actually read interviews with thesps now because they’re almost always fantastically predictable, the men especially. Actors are forever stressing their ordinariness, their beer and football-loving commitments.

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...

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...

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.

Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.

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.

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.

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 as two short planks,’ became the exception as girls from...