Born on June 28th

"So, being a good man is not an exam or a qualification, it changes, and it incorporates being a good friend, a good father, a good employee, a good boss, a good neighbour and a good citizen."

"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."

"Shorts are silly. Men in shorts are silly men. And silly is the very worst thing a man can be."

"I generally only eat one meal a day, which is pretty unusual for a restaurant reviewer. It's not that I have a problem with food; I'll eat anything that doesn't involve a bet, a dare, or an initiation ceremony."

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

"I don't remember ever stealing things, but I suppose I was endlessly borrowing money off people."

"If you're bored, it's because someone else is fulfilling his dream. Become a bore. It's the most interesting thing you'll ever do."

"Bald isn't like being ethnic or disabled. Everyone can and will make jokes about it and expect you to laugh good-naturedly, which you will."

"People collect boredom, they hoard it, they wallow in it, hoping that one day it'll be of interest and become an effete ennui. Let me tell you, it doesn't."

"The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite."

"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."

"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."

"When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins."

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

"If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn't suffer fools gladly."

"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."

"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."

"Everyone has to go to a funeral at some time and you need to be dark and sombre, and in a black tie."

"I don't do dinner parties. I have people come to share the food I've cooked for the family."

"There are five great ages of man - five moments when you need to reevaluate everything, clear out the cupboard and the wardrobe, and most importantly, your head. They are 13, 20, 30, 40 and 60. All men need to know this."

"I don't have prejudices against anybody. I have opinions, based on a lifetime's experience."

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

"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."

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

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

"Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins."

"Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people."

"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."

"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."

"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."