A. A. Gill

Women's handbags are incredibly heavy. You rarely get to pick one up and, when you do, you wonder why anyone carries so much stuff around all day.

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.

It's not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about.

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.

I'm too vain to go on TV. I'd be a monster of self-consciousness. Plus, I've got a ridiculous voice - I sound like a camp friend of Bertie Wooster's.

Clothes maketh the man. They don't make you some other man.

You don't have a choice about fashion or aesthetics - you're in it, whether you like it or not.

For men, privacy means not being told stuff that would hurt. For women, secrecy is having stuff go on behind your back.

Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.

The measure of a man's life is how he copes with the terrible wall of fear.

Frightened is the natural state for all men.

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.

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.

Have you ever wondered why the rich and privileged care about, or even bother with, the gift bag? Because they don't need this stuff. If they wanted it, they could afford to buy it, without blinking. But they love the gift bag, beyond reason.

The problem with a man bag is that it's called a man bag.

You see, the problem with Dave Cameron is that people know who he is. The less people know about him, the more he's likely to get re-elected.

The Lib-Dems are sidekicks. They were born to be sidekicks and that's what they should concentrate on being.

A cravat is the only item of named after Croatians. Balkan mercenaries were brought to Paris by Louis XIV. Their strange and exotic attire attracted the French bon hommes, who were wearing formal ruffs, and who immediately took to the simple and relaxed military cloth tied at the neck.

The only acceptable cravat is the original Croat one.

The trouble with righting some wrongs is that it makes the remaining ones seem even more unbearable.

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.

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.

In fact, everybody should wake up smelling nice. I go further, there is not an excuse, ever, not to smell nice, particularly your feet.

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

The answer is that if God exists, he doesn't seem to mind if you believe in him or not.

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.

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.

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.

Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I'd never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.

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.

Hate numbs the judgment, paralyzes the vitals of democracy.

Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad.

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.

When you look at traditions closely, examine what they really are, you realize they're made up of layers and layers of deferrals, delays, indecisions, tomorrows and long lunches.

Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair's shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist's luck.

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.

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.

People who don't believe in God are no happier than people who do, and those who do believe are no nicer than those who don't.

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.

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.

The French are never happy coming to London; this is an ancient and comforting enmity.

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.

To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.

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.

Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.

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.

Gifts are an important and necessary part of our collective lives. We need to give and we need to allow others to give.

The pleasure in lovers' gifts is that they are often covert and secretive, worn next to the skin, hidden under pillows.

Gift giving is one of the oldest forms of human interaction. It is a behaviour all cultures and all classes share.

Cowboy boots you can't wear unless you actually are a cowboy or in a Status Quo tribute band, or over 60; there's something about a retiring gent in cowboy boots that looks sort of presidential.