London life

Table talk in London these days is so relentlessly gloomy that we need some irreverent juvenile banter to lighten things up

Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes

The secret to working a room is to know when you’re in a room that can’t be worked

The tribes have a lot in common

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately because I recently turned seventy and was considering throwing a big birthday party

There are writers and journalists who get public recognition all the time. Alas, I’m not one

I meant to experience Beauty. Wonder. Awe and all that jouissance jazz. Instead I’m thinking: help!

London literary life in the late 1970s to the late 1980s looks from today like a lost golden age

I could treat the whole thing with bemused Tom Wolfe snarkiness — or keep an open mind and get with the program

Ours is an age that prefers the battle of ideas and opinions rather than pleasure of discovering the mysteries of another person

It’s not a conscious or cruel dumping — it’s the dump of indifference

Even an old grump like me has been having a good time

S&M people might look like perverted children of the Sixties. But for all their weird ways this crowd is the natural ally of conservatives

What’s happening on the London fashion front?

For all my bohemian pretensions, I’m just an old-fashioned bourgeois boy at heart

Cleverness is overrated

Jordan Peterson would be appalled by a man like me — sixty-eight going on sixteen

Writers aren’t fun — they’re miserable egotists and that’s why we write

One should never complain about not being invited to something