Luxury Briefing.

My conception of luxury was fixed by the time I was about 10. Forgive me if distance lends a little rose-hued beauty to this Proustian memory rush, but it went like this....

The perfume industry is vast and in?uential, but pitably disorganised and unadventurous. Anyone who has travelled in a train or a plane or a car (never mind a bus, whatever that is) knows the territory that urgently needs exploration...

Last night I was at a reception in a spectacular architects’ of?ce at the giddy heights of a bold, new skyscraper in one of the most beautiful downtowns in the world...

Whoever wins the next election, the question of class (or, at least, money) and its relationship to taste is not going to go away. This was all magnificently explained a century ago by Thorstein Veblen in his great book The Theory of the Leisure Class...

In the old days the Soviet Union did not allow over-flights and if you wanted to go to Japan you had to jet over the North Pole...

People keep on saying that the old media are dead. But I think that’s wrong. Certainly, you would have to be at the non-responsive end of the Glasgow Coma Scale not to accept that change is in the air, but one essential truth is that no new medium has ever replaced its predecessor...

I have won life’s lottery, but I have never, ever won anything else. Horses, poker, football pools, tennis, chess, nada. Until this year’s British Airways Media Party...

I began my recent Recession Watch Vigil in St James’s. In the study of the sombre comportment of today’s luxury consumer, this part of SW1 is of significance comparable to the Olduvai Gorge in the study of the larrikin antics of early leaf-chewing early hominids...

I’d like to be remembered for a sort of stylish, bruised optimism rather than acidulous disenchantment, but I do find myself wondering ever more recurrently if the greater part of our assumptions about luxury are misplaced....

Besides death and taxes, the weather, exchange rates in the eurozone, viability of teeth-whitening, my fading chances of a romantic encounter with Princess Caroline of Monaco and losing 20 pounds, my current pre-occupation is neuro-aesthetics...