Grace Dent

Two-thousand-and-eighteen is the year of the buffet, and as a restaurant critic, I applaud this.

Being a woman is very often hard.

There are no magical solutions to our nation's housing problem.

My rule of thumb with being in the closet is, as long as you're not spending Sundays thumping a bible about Sodom, or weekdays in the Commons reducing LGBT funding, I'll respectfully await your return ticket from Narnia, if, and not when it comes.

Human beings are complex and flawed, our logic for white lies and our lifelong dissembling evades even ourselves.

Sometimes you only realise how far you've travelled when you turn around and see the distance behind.

Taylor Swift's has made it clear she's pig sick of everyone talking about her, by ensuring everyone in pop land can talk of nothing else. You have to admire this. She is not the Queen of Pop, but she's a brilliantly accomplished jester.

My grandmother and my mother were both told to stop working and take an anonymous role in society when they got married. Their usefulness had other uses now, they were told. Those days are very much over.

Let me live vividly until I drop. Let me drop dead aged 100 against my laptop, still typing this sort of infuriating nonsense, wearing great iridescent primer and my hair roughly the same colour as I wore it in Tenerife in the Nineties.

The one thing society loathes more than a wrinkly, wind-battered old bird trying to keep a high-profile career afloat is the famous woman who refuses to age.

If they said: 'Would you like to be on Gogglebox?' I would just stand up, put my shoes on and begin walking there now. I'd go on with Tom Parker Bowles. Because I love him. And he's so funny.

If you don't love a table groaning with fancy salads, pimped-up couscous, show-stopping trifle and a cubic ton of my grandmother's own recipe Coronation Chicken, watching friends gravitate towards it with plates and sharp elbows, then, sweetie, you're not really an eater.

Give me an impromptu 50-person guest list, a fold-out emergency trestle table and a pack of frozen vol-au-vent cases and, darlings, I will give you a party.

I am not anti-Gwyneth. However, I am against the wholly cynical, harmful machine-pushing of a famous woman - who has endless Hollywood-style food allergies and phobias, and who arguably needs to fit into size 0 costumes to earn her living - into the role of food expert.

I loved the secret language of stupid fancy restaurants: I knew the question 'How do you want that cooked?' is actually rhetorical and you should let the chef please himself.

If someone's more interested in being on their phone than being with you, it's time to get the cheque.

Don't insist on involving your fellow diners in a social media brag. If your guest doesn't want to be snapped mid-gorge then respect that fact.

I am definitely guilty of using social media at a restaurant dining table and I don't see a problem with sharing the odd snap of your meal here and there.

Well, I never went for posh meals when I was little.

I'm from Carlisle, you know, there wasn't any posh restaurants. One of the most exciting meals I had was at the Wimpy.

Prayer is a process of thought that hopefully draws humans to make the right choices.

Prayer, for centuries, has only ever been a way to make humans beings sit still, take stock of the human condition and hopefully try to do things a bit better.

Showbusiness is fickle, transient and harsh.

Whatever the initial challenges were of getting a show like 'Transparent' into production, its success has been triumphant.

What 'Transparent' actually is if you give it a chance is a compelling, intoxicating look at family, siblings, secrets, divorce, being Jewish, mid-life anguish and 'paradise syndrome' malaise.

The moment you become sober, you feel 100% better. Then you have to stop yourself being evangelical because you feel like you've found religion.

I am admittedly eccentric and very silly and I laugh all day and it makes me laugh that people think that I'm going to turn up in a restaurant like Darth Vader.

Food fads are the bane of the critic's life because you're served the same thing again and again.

I really abhor factory farming and its byproducts so I live a vegan lifestyle as much as I can.

I'm a massive animal lover so the glorification of meat doesn't sit right with me. I don't get upset if people eat it around me.

When I was a little girl I always enjoyed the roast potatoes and the vegetables at Sunday dinner more than the meat.

Eating plant-based makes really no impact on my career as a restaurant critic. I see this as my special skill as a critic, not a hindrance.

The truth is I love animals more than I love most humans.

Eighties vegetarians were a lonely, much maligned breed, exposed to frozen pub-lunch veggie lasagnes, prototype soy milk that floated on tea like a tanker spillage, and the pain of buying almost all edible items via postal order from Holland & Barrett.

I'm just a woman who carries oat milk in my handbag, can tell you 10 good ways to scramble tofu and whose favourite primo in many fancy Italian restaurants is two or three contorni wedged together.

When the world is too much, I slip down a rabbit hole and end up watching documentaries on Henry VIII and his wives or War of the Roses.

I love Elizabethan history.

I'm very much the opposite of the person you see on 'MasterChef' in full make-up and a wrap-dress totting around in heels.

The solid, irrefutable truth is that money will make all daily minutiae of life much, much easier and that's why Boris Johnson and thousands of his wage bracket guard their status like lions and always, always need just a bit more.

We must carry on dancing, singing and loving. The other option is to make our worlds tiny, dark and untrusting. I think we all know deep down that this simply won't do.

Sheeran is rarely political. Or preachy. He doesn't present a jet-set, Instagram-perfect, 'No Carbs Till Marbs' view of life. His songs are mainly about love: finding it, being surprised by it, losing it, mourning it. I like his tendency to see relationships as a sort of wonderful temporary mental illness, shadowing everything, ruining all calm.

Much of Sheeran's appeal is that his music skewers the mood of being youthful.

Galway Girl' is a huge, delightfully daft, pseudo-fiddle-dee-dee stomper where Sheeran describes pulling a maverick-sounding woman in Dublin and going on to have the best impromptu night of his life.

Sheeran is pop Marmite, insomuch as many adore him and others make terrific retching noises at his name and behave like you're trying to poison them.

Blatantly, the power which women relish in 'Game of Thrones' corrupts and corrodes exactly as it would their male counterparts.

Back in the 1970s, male prime-time comedians mainly resembled Mr Potato Head. The terrifically popular 'Wheeltappers and Shunters Club' was a comedy show populated mainly by men with 44-inch waists, jowls and NHS glasses.

Oh, yes, they will claim they wear size six off-the-rail dresses or size 28 waist denim due to fancy eating plans, HIIT training and 'running around after my little'uns', but in reality, television people stay slender by nil by mouth.

TV presenting and acting is staffed almost entirely by people who go to bed hungry every evening slightly proud of that hunger as it signals a successful day's intermittent fasting.

Whenever I fancy toast thickly spread with Dairylea I simply think about the times I have been filmed sitting beside Christine Bleakley and then I no longer want the toast but I do want a little cry.

Paltrow is a lovely, watchable actress. She has a likeable sense of humour in interviews.