Novelists From England

"[In an article on Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (1999).] Greer's fundamental conclusion is that the pursuit of equality is now doomed. Instead, women must pursue liberation. "Equality must be seen to be a poor substitute for liberation," she says. Is this a valid distinction? I believe that the pursuit of liberation - the peculiar, individual, often contradictory journey to find freedom from the lies and conventions around us - is something that each individual woman can take on for herself. And yet I believe that it is only possible to pursue that liberation if you are not ground down by an economic and political system that systematically discriminates against you. Inequality in Britain is not a side issue. Inequality locks women out of power, and condemns women to poverty. Inequality prevents women from being fairly rewarded for their work, from being able to speak out and be heard, from being able to bring up their children in dignity, from bringing those who rape and beat them to justice. The struggle for equality is not the struggle to reshape women in the pattern of men, since men's lives too must be revolutionised if equality is to be grasped. Feminism must transform society so that women feel that they can have an equal stake in it, at work and at home. Then indeed we will see the rise of the liberated woman."

"[On the promise of prominent women in the New Labour government elected in 1997.] I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous ­circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, ­because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book's subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don't really think sexism ever went away, it's stronger than it was. It's as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again."

"I was sitting on the floor of my study, with pieces of paper stacked up around me. I felt listless and overwhelmed by the history that I did not want to see. I went to talk to Clara [Walter's daughter]. She was lying on her bed, multitasking in teenage style – listening to music, messaging her friends, studying her homework. "Those forms," I said, wanting her to see what I saw when I looked into the files, the threat as well as the opportunity. "I can’t find my grandmother’s last address. It’s confusing..." I held out one of the many pages I had about the past. "I guess it would be this address, where my great-grandparents were living at the start of the war. I know they were sent to Theresienstadt but not until later. Then to Treblinka. They arrived in Treblinka on 28 September 1942."" My daughter looked at me, and I at her, as the significance of the date penetrated our minds. The previous day’s date. Exactly 75 years after my great-grandparents’ death in Treblinka, we are seeking to regain our German nationality. I left the page I was carrying on her bed and went downstairs to make dinner. The forms got put aside again."

"This fierce, impatient feminism needs to be recognised. I call it the new feminism because it looks very different from the feminism of previous generations. For a start, it can no longer be confined to any kind of ghetto. It is everywhere. In the Seventies, feminism could be identified with a clearly defined women’s liberation movement. It has since fragmented and splintered; but splinters of it are lodged in the hearts and minds of almost every woman in Britain. We should not be diverted by the fact that few women call themselves feminists into believing that feminist beliefs appeal only to a minority of women. In survey after survey the vast majority of women, especially young women, say that they would like to see more equality between the sexes at home and at work. I would also argue that feminism today is not just a middle-class movement. It is often taken for granted that modern feminism appeals only to middle-class professional women. As I researched my book and set up interviews with women from all kinds of backgrounds and in all kinds of occupations, I was struck by the fact that real anger at inequality, real desire for change, and a real sense of women’s growing potential, were being articulated by all the women I spoke to. I heard those ideas just as strongly, if not more strongly, from women who worked as cleaners in south London or as members of community groups in Glasgow as from lawyers or journalists or MPs. My sense that feminism cannot be seen as appealing only to middle-class women is backed up by survey information. For instance, one recent MORI poll showed that women in social groups D and E are more likely than AB women to say that feminism has been good for women."

"One more long happy Sunday had joined the pale golden Sundays that are gone. Better — to us at any rate — than Sundays now. Though these latter-day Sundays may be real enough, to us they are but the illusion and the bygone days the reality. There is always in our minds the hope that we may find again those golden unhastening days and wake up and dream."

"I fear that we are being set a trap and falling into it, by playing this role in a farce that we didn’t script. As many have said, there is a spiralling craziness about this government’s approach, where the actual aim is not to achieve any of the stated objectives but to ratchet up the sense of crisis. We know, and they know, and they know that we know, that one key aim of the Rwanda policy is not to solve any potential challenges caused by arrivals on small boats but to create a distraction from the government’s real challenges. The more polarised and furious the debate gets, the more successful is the distraction. And yet many of us continue to play our role. But we cannot do otherwise. Because, while this performative cruelty may be in part a game to the politicians who put it into practice, for the people who are actually affected by the policy, it is far from a game. The narrative that the Rwanda policy is just a dead cat, thrown on to the table to distract from Partygate and the cost of living crisis, ignores the real harm that the policy is doing and the worse harm that it would do if people stopped opposing it. Let’s not forget that the deportations last week were halted only because people continued to dig in their heels. Dogged individuals at charities supported refugees threatened with deportation day and night and lawyers worked tirelessly on their legal challenges. They all knew that this is no time to give up, because what may look like a farce to some is in fact a tragedy in the making. Nobody who has heard or read any of the interviews with the refugees threatened by removal to Rwanda can be left in any doubt that the cruelty is real."

"Laura looked up at the shelf of her novels, with Adrian Coates's name on their backs. She had been lucky, she thought, to fail into the hands of so agreeable and helpful a publisher. ... So in time her first story went to Adrian, who recognising in it a touch of good badness almost amounting to genius, gave her a contract for two more."

"Every so often there's a generation likes us, Ian. Our only raison d'être to be blown to pieces in a war we imagine we believe in ideologically."

"She laughed. "You haven't changed a bit. You never could stand criticism or leg-pulling. That's why you bored me, Ian. That was the trouble with your generation of so-called intellectual young men. All of you unmitigated, bloody bores with sloppy ideas and no remotest idea how to come to terms with life. When you found life coming to terms with you, you all wondered what the hell had hit you.""

"In general men are very thoughtless creatures. Single-minded, rather. That is what life demands they should be, I think. You only have to take the example of primitive man as hunter and breadwinner. Life demands that he should be singleminded, and nature compensates him by giving him a supreme self-confidence in his ability as a hunter. All his thought is directed towards that end, and at the end is food for himself and his family, and protection for them all. His wife, on the other hand, depends on him for food and protection, but can't actually share his self-confidence from the inside where it matters. Oh - she can believe in him through the sort of vicarious self-confidence something like love can bring, but nature demands that she keeps alert for any slightest sign of failure in the man, because she depends on him for life and livelihood. "And so, Mr Canning, your so-called intuitive woman takes to watching and interpreting every shadow of expression on her man's face. If he's losing confidence, her training in observation detects it as surely as a wart on the end of his nose, and so she bolsters him up, praises him, pushes him, you see, into regaining confidence - and all for the most selfish reasons as you see - and off he goes with his chest out thinking what a fine fellow he is. He might even pause to consider how understanding his wife was, and no doubt he'd then shake his head in mystification and tell his neighbour that woman's instinct was a thing to marvel at. "But then the talent itself has its roots in anxiety, hasn't it? Just as a man's single-mindedness has its roots in hunger."

"I often look back now and regret that I never took my courage in both hands and went out into the world. That's really what a chap should do, Canning. Get out and look. Otherwise," again he paused, "Otherwise you never really see yourself, old man. And it's all so small and petty. A man isn't a man any longer."

"Have you literary ambitions of your own?" "I have dabbled in my time." "Dabbled?" Bluntly, salting my own wound, I said "I had no staying power, Mrs Hurst. Not for the things I wanted to do, at any rate. I imagined much, started little, finished nothing and published not at all." "I think you are too easily discouraged." "I had no original creative talent. In the field of what might be called literary research I had a sort of painstaking, plodding conscientiousness which simply meant I was well on my way to becoming a hack of sound judgment. A man could go on turning out fatuous tripe until the cows come home without necessarily knowing it."

"I was surprised, as one is, I think, whenever the tenuous thread of one's life suddenly connects, as friends, people one would have thought strangers."

"I kept myself very much to myself, as one does if one is old and doesn't much care for the people round about."

"Time is quick. Life is short."

"I had the impression she had become unconscious of her surroundings and was watching the past flick by like a series of moving pictures, silent, uncaptioned; a gate here, a fence there; doors opening upon rooms sometimes empty, sometimes crowded; and stairs, endless, endless stairs down which one was afraid to go for the terror that awaited one's return."

"How ignorant one is when faced with essential practical matters. How they trick and trap you into holes and corners."

"It is said that every seven years of your life you undergo a change which reflects itself in your attitude to your circumstances and to other people, and I think this may be true. If it is, then the change begins towards the end of a seven-year span, at the point, perhaps, where dissatisfaction with what you are doing and with where you are going sets in."

"He relapsed into a silence in which his hopes scattered like mice into holes."

"This mantle of the heroic whereby Right-wing existentialists like Captain America fight against the extreme Right in accordance with democratic values is one of the interesting tricks that’s played with the nature of the heroic... They’ve always known this. Michael Moorcock, amongst others, speaks of the danger of subliminal Rightism in much fantasy writing where you can slip into an unknowing, uncritical ultra-Right and uncritical attitude towards the masculine, towards the heroic, towards the vanquishing of forces you don’t like, towards self-transcendence, for example."

"The point of the New Right is to support all discourses that portend to inequality. If the Right believes in anything it believes in the moral goodness of inequality in all forms, and therefore we support discourse that manifests inegalitarianism and inequality."

"So, there's a total disconnect now between the ruling group and the masses and the masses have got to show some stomach for once, and they've got to be prepared to vote for radical people who will clear out New Labour. Here in the north, in the south, in the east and the west outside England, within Britain and elsewhere. Clear them out! And the Tories will do no good either. You’ve got to clear them out. The Liberals are just a bloc in between the two that give the other two their ideas, all the sort of destructive ideas that Phillips is in favor of and that I talked about earlier. You've got to clear them out as well. There needs to be a new start! And it won’t be UKIP and it won’t be the Greens, even though there are good ideas which are Green and the idea of leaving the European Union (the UKIP option) is an attractive one that should be supported. But there is only really one option for this country and that is to vote for a party that is patriotic, which is British, which is elitist, which is nationalistic, which believes that the only socialism or the only social concern that really is validated by history, by genetics, by identity is patriotism."

"We have become subordinate to the United States, and those in our clerisy, our elite, who think that the United States isn't the answer, want to get closer to Europe as an alternative model. In other words, whatever model they choose, Britain isn't in the middle or the first port of call, because they believe that Britain is over. They believe they can rule over the ruins, but it's the culture of the ruins that ruins the culture."

"What do we think should be done with the murderers of Baby P? Yes, we should hang them until they are dead, and we should let the masses see it, and we should televise it and put it on before Question Time."

"The danger of the ideology of the victim, which I don't really subscribe to except as a tactic on occasion, is that you begin to think like a victim, and you begin to act like a victim. Many of our people now are almost asking for a whipping, asking for a collective beating, asking to be forgiven for the past, asking to be forgiven for sins and crimes of the past which they never committed, which they’re hardly aware of, which can be reconstrued as episodes of heroic cruelty or glorious vanguardism that don't even need to be apologised for in the past or in the present."

"But the truth of the matter is the more English you become through remembrance and historicism and identification, the more British you are. And the more British you are, the more European you are. And by European, I mean White. Nothing to do with an endorsement of the politics of the European Union. And the more you esteem and value yourself the more you will be interested in the culture of your own people and what they have achieved."

"Everything is ideological. Every BBC news broadcast is totally ideological, and is in some respects a soft form of Communism, which is what liberalism is... If I was running the BBC, it would be slightly different from what's on tonight."

"Liberalism is moral syphilis, and I'm stepping over it!"

"People are unequal! 75% of it's genetic and biological. Partly criminality's biological; predispositions to drug addictions are biological; intelligence is biological; beauty is biological; ferocity or a predisposition to it is biological; intellect is biological. You can do a bit, but you're born to be what you are, and we should celebrate what we were born to be."

"If people with our sorts of values ruled modernity, everything about this society would be at one level the same, and in every other respect completely different. People would still drive contemporary cars, there'd still be jets, and there'd still be supercomputers and so on, but the texture and the nature of life would be different in every respect. How so? Firstly, cultures would be mono-ethnic. Secondly, there would be a respect for the past glories of our civilisation. Thirdly, we would not preface every attempt to be strong by saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry for what we have done..." We're not sorry! And we've stepped over the prospect of being sorry."

"But Hamas can enjoy a wicked smile of satisfaction: it laid a deadly trap – and Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel right into it."

"This is where you wind up when you view this conflict in monochrome, as a clash of right v wrong. Because the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land. So, this is not a football game. It has no need for spectators who root for one team against the other, goading their chosen side to go to ever further extremes. This is not a game, for one grimly obvious reason. There are no winners – only never-ending loss."

"[[Keir Starmer|[Keir] Starmer]]'s message was that he knew the country had put Labour in chiefly to get the Tories out – but that he hoped that he might, through a spell of solid governance, secure the public's trust. It is an unusual kind of political logic – having won an election, he now hopes to win over the people – but it fits the times. Britons are exhausted, wary and sceptical. They have seen the big promises, charismatic performers and grand schemes – Brexit, levelling up – all come to nothing."

"Some have taken this episode as a cue to assert that no one knows more about racism than Jews, that no one has suffered more than we have. This is to play Abbott's game, to assert that there is a "hierarchy of racism", and that my pain trumps yours. But this is not a competition; and if it is, it's not one any of us would want to win. Instead, we should join hands with those who, like us, have endured racism and hatred for a long time. Jews, black Britons, Asian Britons, Muslims, Irish people, Travellers – we have one big, sad thing in common. Those who hate one of us tend to hate us all."

"When it comes to Diane Abbott, two important things need to be said first. One is that as the first black woman elected to parliament, she will always have an important place in the political history of this country. The other is that, according to one study, she receives more abuse, both racist and sexist, than any other woman in parliament, and by some distance. Yet both of those facts only make her letter all the more dispiriting, even baffling. How could someone with such direct experience of racism show such little understanding of how it works for people who are not the same as her?"

"The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory."

"But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before."

"This poses its own danger for democracy. Because there can be no collective decision-making – which is what democracy amounts to – without a collective, agreed-upon basis of facts. If we can’t first agree that the house is on fire, we can’t begin to talk about putting out the flames."

"Its origin is 27 March 1945; the 77th anniversary is a little over a week away. Early that morning, at 7.21am, a V2 rocket landed on Hughes Mansions, a block of flats on Vallance Road in the East End. It killed 134 people, more or less instantly. Among them were two sisters, Rivvi and Feige (pronounced fay-ghee). Feige Hocherman was 33 and she left behind two children, a son not yet 11 and a daughter aged eight and a quarter. The little girl was my mother, Sara. The war was in its final weeks and the bomb that fell that morning would be the very last V2 to land on London. It wasn't a targeted missile, though if it had been it could hardly have delighted its masters more. For of the 134 people killed by that Nazi rocket, 120 were Jews."

"Whether it was his refusal to see what was wrong in a mural depicting Jews as hooked-nosed bankers making money off the backs of the poor; his suggestion that Jews might be born in this country but would never quite grasp "English irony"; his praise for a book that blamed 19th-century imperialism on finance houses run by "a single and peculiar race"; his warm embrace of a man who had repeated the ancient lie that Jews consume the blood of gentile children – pick your example – it was Corbyn who made British Jews feel an anxiety they had not known for the best part of a century. It was he who acted as a magnet, drawing in assorted cranks and bigots to join a party whose great name they soiled by their very presence."

"I am the son of that terrified little girl and I always will be."

"And yet, 7 October 2023 is also a landmark event in Jewish history. It will be remembered as a byword for Jewish vulnerability, the more painful for coming in the very place where Jews were supposed at last to have shaken off the powerlessness that blighted them for two millennia."

"The catharsis lasted all of three hours. From 10am on Thursday morning until lunchtime, British Jews were allowed to feel a small measure of relief: after nearly five years of being dismissed as liars and dissemblers, deceitfully engaged in an elaborate smear campaign, a neutral legal arbiter had ruled that those who had sounded the alarm about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party were, after all, telling the truth. Yet the pause for reflection that so many had hoped for expired before it had really begun. It was overtaken by word that Labour had suspended Corbyn for suggesting that the whole business had been "dramatically overstated". ..."

"Yes, some in Hamas say they want political negotiations, but past experience suggests if there's a chance of an agreement that entails any outcome other than the annihilation of Israel, then the maximalists of Hamas will veto it with violence. Israel has its own saboteurs, its own maximalists. Several of them are inside Netanyahu's ultra-right government, ministers sharing their macabre fantasies of a flattened Gaza on social media, the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, men apparently determined to deepen the current violence by ensuring it spreads to the West Bank and inside Israel itself."

"[After referring to his March 2016 column cited above.] But these warnings were cast aside, dismissed as politically motivated smears rather than cries of pain and concern from a community that, for generations, had seen Labour as its political home. The dismissal came from the very top: when that column of mine appeared, Corbyn was filmed declaring it to be "utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness"."

"[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ... The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [[Margaret Hodge|[Margaret] Hodge]], it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war."

"We thought the United States would step back from the abyss. We believed, and the polls led us to feel sure, that Americans would not, in the end, hand the most powerful office on earth to an unstable bigot, sexual predator and compulsive liar."

"Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny. The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews."

"[Referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working definition of antisemitism] [T]he only pro-Palestinian who needs to fear the IHRA is the one who wants to say Jews are disloyal to their own countries, that Jews are Nazis and that the very idea of Jews having a homeland of their own is "a racist endeavour". You can say all of those things more easily under Labour's new code – the age-old accusation of disloyalty, for example, is no longer classified as antisemitic – which is one reason why the vast bulk of the Jewish community opposes it. But the IHRA itself, properly applied, allows plenty of scope. You can, if you want, say everything the state of Israel has done since its birth has been racist. All it prohibits is branding as a racist endeavour "a state of Israel" – the principle that Jews, like every other people on Earth, should have a home and refuge of their own."

"The Republican party’s shift away from democratic norms is no longer confined to one man, even if he embodies it and accelerates it. It is embedded in the ethos of the party now. Reversing that trend is a daunting prospect because of another shift, one that has been apparent for a while but which is taking especially vivid form in these midterm elections. It is the polarisation of information, so that Americans now exist in two distinct spheres of knowledge, each one barely touching the other."