99 Quotes by Peter York

Stephen Jones’ hats are what we used to call ‘creations’; extravagant, odd things for extravagant, odd people like Madonna or Lady Gaga. They’re worn in a parallel universe.

My friends adore ‘TOWIE’ – the TV documentary series, ‘The Only Way is Essex.’ They like it, I’m afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a ‘can you believe those people?’ way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.

Marmite – like that other little black-jar job, Bovril – is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.

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.

The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house – and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.

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

There are pop managers, and then there’s Simon Cowell, who isn’t gay, Jewish or particularly riveting. He’s not without interest but he doesn’t exactly have the hinterland of, say, Brian Epstein.

I’m certainly not a person who spends their every waking moment soaking themselves in signs and signals of the sort that cult studies people study; and it’s partly, I suppose, because some of those signs and signals aren’t worth bothering about. You have to be selective about these things.

In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs – monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism – have been working their way through the culture ever since.