If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.