Victoria Coren Mitchell
Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.Collection: Anger
When I was learning to drive, I thought the big milestones were changing gear, changing lane, and three-point-turns.Collection: Learning
Driving a car is no longer about zooming down clear lanes, the joy and freedom of the road flowing through your hair like a fine westerly breeze. It's about solid traffic, petrol fumes, spy cameras, eco-guilt, and simultaneous social media.Collection: Car
I have a complicated relationship with the zoo; maybe everyone does. It's so wonderful and so sad.Collection: Relationship
London Zoo is amazing. I want to take my child there so that she can feel the awe and wonder I felt (and feel) myself.Collection: Amazing
I'm not a luddite. Science, computers, medicine, they're all great. But nature is context. That which we can't control. Its constant mortality and immortality is an answer to the terror of finite existence. It reassures the soul.Collection: Computers
The truth is, I feel sorry for the Old Etonians. Everybody should be judged on his or her own merits. Assuming that toffs are 'out of touch' is more modern and fashionable than assuming they have a 'natural fitness for government,' but it's no fairer.Collection: Fitness
Weight gain is good because it makes your dresses tight. This is not necessarily classy or flattering, but it means you don't have to iron anything.
They say multitasking is a female trait, but it's not about gender; it's about personality type.
The key to nature's therapy is feeling like a tiny part of it, not a master over it. There's amazing pride in seeing a bee land on a flower you planted - but that's not your act of creation, it's your act of joining in.
When I was at school, I got into trouble quite often.
I had an instinct to take my husband's name when I got married. It felt like a romantic statement of pride, love, and permanence and of doing what's always been done in my family.
I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.
I never wanted poker to be a job. That's partly because I love it, and it's fun, and I didn't want it to stop being fun, and partly because, I suppose, something in me doesn't feel right about calling poker a job. It's not grown-up enough. But it's a hobby that takes up an enormous amount of my time.
I am a big fan of Bournemouth, having enjoyed many happy hours on its sandy beach and crazy golf course.
I've always hated the idea of carrying grudges and resentments around like a load of mouldy suitcases.
Casino games such as roulette, blackjack, baccarat, slot machines and so on, are stacked in favour of the house.
I know that I'm probably far more pedestrian and less talented than many who dreamed of becoming writers but couldn't see the road so easily.
My 'Only Connect' personality isn't put on: it's definitely me.
My speeding offences (whether caught or not) are always in situations where the speed limit is 30, but I think it's 40. And I'm never doing 40, always a careful 37.
Socks and sandals together are absolutely fine, as long as your flares are wide enough to cover your feet.
In 'The Pianist,' Polanski transformed his ghastly knowledge of the camps into an act of artistic self-expression.
People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.
Given the choice, I'm sure the majority of children would rather have a packed lunch than school meals.
Given the choice, the majority of children wouldn't go to school at all. The whole thing's ghastly.
The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty.
Half the point of education is to build peer groups and social bonds.
The idea of MPs texting and emailing through debates makes my gorge rise, as it does when a minicab driver makes phone calls at the wheel. I'm not paying you to keep in touch with your mates!
Anyone who's tuned in to the House of Commons TV coverage knows the benches are often empty. I like that. I'm a big fan of political transparency. It's good for us to know which debates the MPs consider important enough to show up for, and which not.
I like the fact that the weather forecast is always wrong. In a world of BlackBerry insta-connection, Google research, and Hadron Colliders, it is a daily reminder of the ultimate ignorance of man. It is a signpost towards all the enormous things we cannot understand.
You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.
It is impossible to identify a nice scent from within the chemical cloud of a perfume department.
We all look stupid in patterned tights.
The millions who watch 'Downton Abbey' do so neither relating to the Granthams nor hating them. It's an amused enjoyment of spectacle.
If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.
Seeking to ban things is as bossy as you can get.
I was a sporadically bossy child.
I was never, in my whole school career, given a job as a monitor, a form captain, or a prefect. I never won any kind of prize.
I'm no longer bossy in the honest sense; I've mastered (mistressed) the art of passive-aggression.
Politics is a pure meritocracy. That's why Gordon Brown's cabinet had two brothers and a married couple in it. They just happened to be the best people around.
Many moneyed children grow up with no drive at all.
After a bath, we all love to dry off with a towel. But do we need it to survive? No. It's a luxury.
Pudding is not a human right.
Everyone likes a pair of comfy shoes. But is this an automatic right? Comfy shoes are clearly not allowed at the Oscars, for example. Why should criminals enjoy a treat that is denied to our favourite actresses? All prisoners, male and female, should be obliged to wear high heels. This would also make them easier to catch during riots.
Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Master's in Economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.
I'm really bored by the constant vilifying of people (especially women) for things they didn't say.
Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.
My own, purely personal view is that reading, study, poetry, and scientific experiment might be more rewarding than a job or children, so I would never advise anyone against university if they're going for the right reasons.
I've never understood why the knowledge training and rigorous testing of London cabbies isn't rolled out all over the U.K.
Insomniacs will be familiar with that disastrous moment as you lie there in the dark, with your eyes shut, when you think, 'What does my brain actually have to do to make me become asleep? What is the difference between that state and this? Why is the weird, invisible change not happening tonight?'