A. A. Gill
The one thing politicians will always vote for is more politics, so in 2000 they invented the post of mayor of London without ever really thinking what it was a mayor would do.Collection: Politics
My only piece of advice is that all of you consider every single text and Snapchat that you ever make as also being shared with your partner, because they all check your phones all the time - trust me on this one.Collection: Trust
The truth is a mayor can actually do very little to alter the course of a huge city run by the free market that is home to banking - the engine room of capitalism.Collection: Home
Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else - university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.Collection: Age
Have you noticed that almost all the change in the world goes to women? When was the last time you had a five pence piece? Exactly. In a Christmas pudding. All the rest of it is in women's handbags.Collection: Christmas
The measure of a man's life is how he copes with the terrible wall of fear.Collection: Fear
Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.Collection: Men
Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.Collection: Learning
Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.Collection: Experience
This is the trouble with cheating: there are no acceptable rules, or laws. It could be a smile, or dancing to a song that you considered to be indefinably 'ours'. It can feel like cheating to go to a restaurant that you used to go to with someone else. Keeping photographs of exes can infuriate, like retrospective cheating.Collection: Smile
Really, I like the future. I appreciate my automatic alarm-call necklace in case I get lost and confused in a mall. I appreciate the watch that tells the hospital my blood pressure's gone ballistic. I like my computer, just as long as it doesn't get ideas above its workstation.Collection: Future
London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren's churches and ushered in the Georgian city.Collection: Great
You can propose marriage naked or in handcuffs, but no one is going to agree to forsake all others for a man in shorts. You can't declare war in shorts or deliver a eulogy in shorts.Collection: Marriage
Learning Jimmy Carr riffs off by heart is not the way to anyone's heart, unless you're Jimmy Carr. And remember, the two most attractive things in a man is a sense of danger and being able to make a girl feel really safe.Collection: Learning
To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.
The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.
Frightened is the natural state for all men.
Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.
The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who's got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors.
It's not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about.
Penicillin and plastic bags help a lot, fridges and hot water make manliness more comfortable and Tom Ford's fragrance range makes it smell better, but the idea that has pushed our lives into the light more than any other -ism or -ology is feminism.
Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.
I generally only eat one meal a day, which is pretty unusual for a restaurant reviewer. It's not that I have a problem with food; I'll eat anything that doesn't involve a bet, a dare, or an initiation ceremony.
It is impossible to be taken seriously in shorts. No one has ever cared about anything said by a man in shorts.
The problem with a man bag is that it's called a man bag.
When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.
A cravat has to be approached with consummate self-confidence and a devilish nonchalance. A cravat has to be grasped by a man who knows how to treat a cravat.
Gift giving is one of the oldest forms of human interaction. It is a behaviour all cultures and all classes share.
Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best.
I don't remember ever stealing things, but I suppose I was endlessly borrowing money off people.
I'm terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.
I can tell very quickly when people are lying.
I don't do dinner parties. I have people come to share the food I've cooked for the family.
No 13-year-old or over should ever be seen in trousers that finish above the ankle. It doesn't matter how good your legs are, or if you're on a beach in Bermuda where they invented the things.
Songs are all poetry, and they don't make any sense.
In fact, everybody should wake up smelling nice. I go further, there is not an excuse, ever, not to smell nice, particularly your feet.
The only acceptable cravat is the original Croat one.
The Lib-Dems are sidekicks. They were born to be sidekicks and that's what they should concentrate on being.
I've often been accused of dressing too well. I've always been fascinated by fashion, though I don't think I'm particularly fashionable.
Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.
The London police have discovered that the best way to neuter demonstrations is not to move everyone on, or disperse troublemakers, but hold them close, cordon them into a diminishing space for hours and hours, as a sort of arbitrary al fresco arrest.
The French are never happy coming to London; this is an ancient and comforting enmity.
Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left in the world. He would win an election in any one of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity.
Suits are malevolent magicians' sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.
The suit is the polite taming, the socialising, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those pointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical.
Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.
One of the small joys that's easy to miss in London is the blue plaques on buildings. These are put up to commemorate the famous on the houses they lived in.
Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad.
There's no pleasing the British, or winning their favor. They simply hate politicians. All politicians. Hatred goes with politicians like mint sauce with lamb. It's as old as Parliaments.
No British TV company could ever make a series like 'The West Wing' about British politics. It would beggar credibility. No one could write it with a straight face, or perform it without giggling.