A biography for A. A. Gillhasn’t been written yet.
“The problem with a man bag is that it's called a man bag.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.”
“The only acceptable cravat is the original Croat one.”
“The real question is: if you knew there was a god, would you behave any differently? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps you should assume there is.”
“The part that makes you unique is the bit people will like or fear, fall in love with, or try to avoid.”
“Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.”
“The Lib-Dems are sidekicks. They were born to be sidekicks and that's what they should concentrate on being.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else - university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.”
“We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colours of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck.”
“When Americans come to London they usually say how much they love the history, the tradition, the splendid tumpty-tum of things whose very repetition has become their point.”
“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.”
“As handbags get ever more absurdly large, so they need to carry more stuff to validate the expense of this huge trunk with chains, buckles and padlocks on.”