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

In London - and forget those extra public pressures on politicians - the lovely old Sloane world of manor houses simply hasn't cut it since Big Bang in 1986, the point at which Mrs. Thatcher really started to achieve her ambition to make this country more like America - its ambition, economy, it's very tangible measures of success.

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 read them.

Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.

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.

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.

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.