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 Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.

Kate Middleton's a pretty girl who sounds nice.

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

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.

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 visions of what the new ideal upper-middle-y life looked like.

For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them.

Men turn to formal wear when they want a new job or when they think their current one is in danger. They try to present themselves as powerful and successful.