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

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

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.

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

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

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 show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude.

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