Women journalists from England

"You either know fashion or you don't."

"If you look at any great fashion photograph out of context, it will tell you just as much about what's going on in the world as a headline in The New York Times."

""[The democratization of luxury] means more people are going to get better fashion. And the more people who can have fashion, the better."

"Fashion's not about looking back. It's always about looking forward."

"Anna happens to be a friend of mine, a fact which is of absolutely no help in coping with the cold panic that grips me whenever we meet."

"The notion that Anna would want something done "now" and not "shortly" is accurate."

"When I was a media reporter, there were many high-profile editors, and God knows they had big egos, but you could still get them on the phone ... Remnick, Carter, Fuller, even Martha Stewart. But Wintour? She just never talked to peons like us ... It was beneath her. And all the while I'm thinking, "Who is this skank?" She plays up this aristocratic, Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake" routine, but, excuse me, can I get some proof that she holds a title of nobility that goes back to the 13th century? No. All she does is edit a magazine. That's it. So what's with the royalty routine? . . . I mean, for Christ's sake, the woman slept with Bob Marley, one of the most soulful people ever to walk the face of the earth. If that didn't spiritualize her, nothing would ... Wintour will be escorted by eunuchs to a place in hell run entirely by large rats."

"In a sea of women's glossies that purport to be about fashion but publish earnest articles chronicling the author's quest for self-actualization, Vogue stands apart. The voluminous fashion pages are arty, original, and sophisticated, shot by talented photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn, and Steven Meisel. Most of us read Vogue not with the intention of buying the wildly expensive clothes, but because doing so educates our eye and hones our taste, similar to the way eating gourmet food refines the palate. This is a pleasure enabled by Wintour's ruthless aesthetic, her refusal to participate in the democratizing tendency of most of her competitors. To deny her that privilege is to deny her readers the privilege of fantasy in the form of beautifully photographed Paris couture"

"People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what."

"Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to."

"The best careers advice given to the young ... is "Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.""

"A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it."

"The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own."

"I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one."

"There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes."

"Hats divide generally into three classes: offensive hats, defensive hats, and shrapnel."

"No nice men are good at getting taxis."

"The Nazi murder squads just wouldn't waste a bullet on a child. I just couldn't process that. I couldn't handle it."

"As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure."

"The trouble with modern cooking is that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure."

"There are two Christmas traditions I've inherited from my mother. One is the feeling that Christmas isn't complete if you haven't got a ham as well as a turkey. It means that the leftovers are much better. And in a curious way, despite the fact that we're talking about Christmas and ham, it's a very Jewish thing to want to provide a huge spread. I always cook for eight, but make enough to feed 30..."

"While I am sure there are a number of women who secretly wonder whether they are lesbian, most simply have, somewhere, a fantasy about having sex, in a non-defining, non-exclusive way, with other women."

"My sister lives in New York and she was struck by how class-ridden the reviews were. Everyone had to mention that I'm posh. British people are obsessed by that. I said to John, 'I'm not posh.' Is my voice posh?""

"It’s true that I wouldn’t have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation. It's also this Jewish thing of naming and remembering people, and I think there is a sense of keeping that side of life going."

"The thing I liked about writing about food when I started it was that I felt I was writing about food in a different way. Not like a food writer."

"I used to refer to myself as Typhoid Mary. It wasn't that I was jinxed, I just seemed to bring ill fortune to anybody I was close to."

"Cooking aside, I am what you'd call a domestic slut. Cooking is really the only domestic activity I enjoy. I would do anything not to do the normal bits of household work - it's not one of my strong points."

"It's like I can never watch myself on TV unless I have to do some editing before a show comes out. It's like hearing your voice back on a tape recorder and I'm sure you know how horrible that is. I always look for the worst things in myself - criticising my hair and stuff. I'm very self-conscious about it all."

"[A]ll food images, if they are successful, have the power to arouse appetite. They should be luscious and sexy. I have no embarrassment about the culinary come-on. But that's the limit of my erotic intent. I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble."

"I think cooking should be about fun and family. [...] I'm not a trained chef. I don't pretend to be and I think part of my appeal is that my approach to cooking is really relaxed and not rigid. There are no rules in my kitchen."

"I think sometimes that people assume because I'm on television I'm an expert, but I think the whole point of what I do is that I'm not and I don't have any training. [...] My approach isn't about a fancy ingredient or style. I cook what I love to eat."

"I always wanted to be called Caroline [...] Carolines were always very nice in books."

"I don't wear anything in bed. But I'm not ready for a nude scene quite yet."

"I took a fortnight off. But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here. Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me."

"I was shy as a child. Now I'm not really shy any more, unless I'm with shy people. I find it contagious and I don't know what to say. But I don't think shyness is something one should feel apologetic about."

"I am greedy. I eat under stress. When you are eating, the rest of the world is tuned out. And when you tune back in you feel guilty about having been greedy and the rest of the world is still there, so you have to carry on eating!"

"I don't take criticisms personally, which must be very annoying for people who mean them personally."

"Some people did take the domestic goddess title literally rather than ironically. It was about the pleasures of feeling like one rather than actually being one."

"I lurch from chaos to chaos. I can’t find my driving licence and my clothes are everywhere – cooking is the neatest thing I do."

"But I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in."

"It's not meant to be flirtatious. Listen, I don't have a presenting style, I'm just me. I don't have the talent to adopt a different persona. It's intimate, not flirtatious."

"It wasn't really a chat show, it was a magazine show. I looked at it as a summer job. As long as no one makes me interview a celeb again, I'll be happy. It wasn't what I signed up for but, of course, nowadays everyone likes celebs. I'm pretty bored of them, though. I wasn't interested and couldn't be bothered to pretend I was."

"[O]besity isn’t caused by those who adore food. People tend not to put on weight through eating meals. I’d say it’s people who eat non-stop."

"As quoted by Nigel Slater regarding "OFM Best Food Personality 2014", The Guardian Archive.org (19 October 2014)"

"Everybody likes to think cooks are nurturing, but maybe we're just controlling – controlling what people eat."

"Sometimes I think food preoccupies me too much. [...] The only thing that keeps me going at the theatre is thinking about what I'll eat afterwards, although now I bring sandwiches because I can't bear it"

"[Asked if cookery writing is a form of intimacy] I think there both is and isn't. I feel that writing about food allows one to be utterly honest, and personal, and in no way guarded. But, in some sense, it's a metaphor for the personal, rather than being actually personal. It's not revelatory, I would say. It's personal without being confessional. That's the kind of personal that I feel more comfortable with."

"I have long been convinced that Nigella's iconic status has less to do with her abilities than a desire on the part of her admirers to invest in what she represents."

"If you looked up 'multi-tasking' in the dictionary, the words 'Nigella Lawson' would probably appear alongside."

"No doubt there can be a shy, reserved side to Nigella Lawson - and some people interpret this as coldness - but it is not in evidence today. She seems flamboyant, if anything, and perhaps this is a persona she can slip in and out of (John Diamond once described her as 'a gay man trapped in a woman's body')."

"Nigella inhabits a strange world of extremes: she has experienced extreme tragedy, extreme success and has the advantage of extreme beauty."

"Lawson's sexy roundness mixed with her speed-demon technique, makes cooking dinner with Nigella look like a prelude to an orgy."

"Her descriptions of food can be a tangle of adjectives."

"She has flawless skin, perfect white teeth, a voluptuous body, ample height and lots of lush, brown hair. And then there are those cookbooks, which have become international best sellers. She has become enough of an icon stateside to be profiled last year in People and Vanity Fair."

"Nigella Lawson – Britain’s only true "surname unnecessary" global celebrity since Princess Diana – is feeding everyone."

"What it is, is that you're (Trinny) the accelerator and I'm (Susannah) the break. And that's why it works."

"Posh does not equal style. Really, God, that's just ridiculous. Posh equals tradition. Anyone can achieve style. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're from."

"I'm much more self-conscious clothed than unclothed. I'm a frustrated Page Three girl. I have no shame about my body."

"My boobs are the bane of my life, they're a real burden. Every time I have a baby, I go up two sizes. I'll probably be an E cup after this. I can't bear it."

"The show is much more emotional now. It's a journey, but it is still about clothes, too. It's been fascinating to see how looking good and having faith in your appearance makes you into a sexier person, which makes you attractive to your partner again. We come in as complete strangers and get to know them all extremely well. It was a privilege for Trinny and I to have these people feel they could open up to us. It was very humbling, too."

"For us, it’s all about shape, and how that is going to cure a bodily defect."

"In social situations I still feel scared. My best friend and husband give me the freedom to be myself."

"I worked in Harrods as a sales girl and I was so lazy, I just sat on my arse all day. Now I have huge respect for shop girls. It was boring, so I tried to shoplift things, but we’d always get our bags checked."

"It’s been very satisfying to design a range which is all about shape. It’s not about what size you are, it’s about how you can minimise or accentuate parts of your body with clothing. That’s what we’ve created."

"This series is more campaigning. It is more journalistic, but still hugely entertaining. It's a show we feel more proud of than anything we've done to date."

"It is a myth that style can't be learnt. It's all about dressing for your body shape, following the rules and wearing colours that suit your skin tone."

"Ultimately, what we're doing is giving people confidence. We're probably the only people who have an opinion, who care how ordinary people dress. No one at Vogue magazine gives a shit. They work with the designers, it's more creative and artistic — they are creating something beautiful. But they don't care about how their readers end up looking — whereas we do!"

"I had one little glimpse in the mirror and it was like an electric shock. Horrifying. It took me three or four days to get over it. On air, the plastic surgeon said: "Would you have anything done?" Oh no, I said. "Do you smoke?" No, never. Soon as the camera was off I took his card and had a cigarette."

"I did have Botox once and I felt like I'd had a stroke. It was so claustrophobic."

"Too fat, too thin, what the fuck are you supposed to be? God bless the media!"

"Our primary concern is not to be style icons ourselves."

"We've created a range of clothing which is almost like a prescription from the doctor. Our clothes do the same thing. If you're not happy with your bum, then there's a coat that's going to hide it. If you want to create a waist, there's a dress that's going to do that for you too. We've designed it very much around the female body.""

"Generally speaking Scottish women are pretty good. Look at Sharleen Spiteri and Lulu — you've got two fabulously well-dressed women in different ways."

"In my case I slob around in old clothes in the country. But I have the luxury of knowing I can pull myself out of that. So I don't feel bad about looking like shit."

"“…reminds us why these two well-dressed, slightly chaotic, posh ladies are so entertaining”"

"Susannah at home is quite the opposite to Trinny... Susannah has a big rambling house and there's dogs and there's kids and there's nannies, and you can come over anytime you like, and if you can have supper she'll throw it together in a minute. It's easy, it's fabulous to be around her."

"You just don't expect posh girls to grab your tits, call your trousers "too clitty" and use words like "pussy pelmet" but they do. You are so shocked by what they are saying that by the time you have recovered and thought of something to say they have whipped you out of your jeans and eased you into a Lycra cat suit."

"Susannah ... is on the right side of voluptuous and more laid-back. She loses things likes credit cards and keys."

"By the end of the interview, I pluck up the courage to ask Susannah whether she thinks my bra fits. She stares at my chest: "You’re wearing a 34C and you should be in a 32DD." I get home and check. She’s right."

"Susannah has become less of a Sloane Ranger and more into real life. She’s also more career-minded."

"Trinny and Susannah are what they are — there's no fakery."

"I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say."

"Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters."

"She opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."

"Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood."

"They were burning the stubbled fields and a great stain of smoke flooded the horizon. Nothing amiss here, nothing derelict, the roofs newly thatched, the hedges trimmed, the gardens bright with flowers."

"We would do better to make our judgments on society from a study of literature, for in fiction the concept of division becomes fact — from Disraeli's Sybil with its subtitle 'The Two Nations' and Mrs Gaskell's North & South, through George Eliot, Dickens and Hardy to Lawrence's ' and the ' of , the novel is choked with the theme of a people divided not only by borders but by circumstances of birth and opportunity."

"My husband, Austin Davies, taught John Lennon at . In fact, the night we separated, my husband had a party in our house to which the Beatles, John Lennon, —the one who died—and I can’t remember who else, came. The party went on for three days and nights; I moved out down the road to a friend’s house with the children, and later we divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles again."

"Beryl Bainbridge, who has died of cancer aged 75, wore her hard-won recognition lightly. She was acknowledged as one of the best novelists of her generation, and was made a in 2000, but she lost none of her black humour or raffish image to her new status as a literary grande dame. Her prolific output included 18 novels, three of which were filmed, two collections of short stories, several plays for stage and television, and many articles, essays, columns and reviews. She won the and two , but although five of her novels reached the shortlist – The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), Every Man for Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998) – none of them won it. She bore the disappointment with a wit and detachment honed by a lifetime's practice."

"A great cricketer must be an artist and express himself in his strokes."

"'This is the stupidest place I have ever visited,' she said. 'I shall never come here again.' The tall man looked at her in silence and nodded. 'Yes, you will,' he said. 'You won't be able to stay away now that you have come.'"

"Now the Englishmen suddenly came to life. Four runs later Harvey received a beast of a ball from Tyson which spat up at him and splashed off his bat to Cowdrey, 104 for 4."

"As we at all times criticise the Premier for his management of home affairs, call Mr Butler a fool for his Budget, find fault with Beecham's conducting, or Gielgud's performance, can we not, sometimes, say that our cricketers are not quite so brilliant as usual?"

"I have been treated as a freak, rather like the fat lady at the circus."

"Very few reporters in Fleet Street can write on the game with as much observation, sense of scene and character, and knowledge of the things that technically and tactically matter."

"The work of an enthusiast who has watched and enjoyed cricket with an eye for detail and for character, for adventure and the human reflection beyond the ropes. It will, I fancy, be read with the same pleasure as it was written."

"The Australia of her book is not merely a setting for cricket but a place of interest, of fun and of new impressions"

"A Pin To See The Peep-Show"

"If your opponent imagines that because you are a woman you’re easy to bluff, that you’d never bluff yourself and that you can be pushed around, you can exploit those assumptions."

"Stuart Wheeler says women are no good at poker?! If he fancies playing a bit of Heads Up, he knows where to find me."

"[During the 1981 trial of Peter Sutcliffe, commonly known as the Yorkshire Ripper.] I remember having terrible nightmares during the trial, feeling that the police were misunderstanding things badly because they insisted that Sutcliffe had a moral stand. To me it was clear his crimes expressed a simple, virulent loathing of the female which did not need fancy explanations like those arrived at by the police. The thing is that most people in the book are not what ordinary people would describe as outcasts; they are ordinary men. That was why it was important to end up with the Ripper. Because what is important about him is that he is not different; it's only a question of degree. I don't go along with the idea that all men are rapists or that they are the product of Original Sin, rather that we have a culture which supports and encourages misogyny and what we have to face is that a sizeable number of men hold very strange and perverted views about women."

"We live in circumstances which not only restrict our freedom but physically threaten us if we step out of line: in this culture, the penalty for being a woman is sometimes death. Yet it is extraordinarily unacknowledged. I think sometimes you have to define a problem before you start to find a solution and for years and years I've felt as though I live in occupied territory. My interest is in finding a way of constructing a path out of that territory."

"[On Julian Assange] The super-hacker appears to be relaxed about links with authoritarian regimes, presenting a chat show for Russia Today, a state-funded TV network, and seeking asylum in a Latin American country with a not exactly admirable record on freedom of expression."

"It's time his double standards were spelled out: Assange has used his hacking skills to turn himself into a worldwide phenomenon, and now he demands for himself exactly the same impunity he excoriates in politicians."

"This has been a good week to be a republican. Strike that: it's been a fantastic week, as news organisations wake up to the fact that sentimental attitudes to the Royal Family are not universally shared. I've lost count of the times I've been asked to provide "a republican voice" by broadcasters, which is a very welcome change. But editors should have been warned by a YouGov poll earlier this month, which showed that more people in India than the UK were interested in the royal birth. Far from a nation panting for news, just over half of British adults (53 per cent) were uninterested, compared to 46 per cent who were "very" or "fairly" interested. In this context, any headline beginning "the country" or "the world" is bound to be wrong; I'm sure there were swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the arrival of Prince George went entirely unremarked, but degrees of indifference were visible in London as well. When I arrived on Monday evening to do a TV interview outside Buckingham Palace, where an eager crowd had supposedly gathered to wait for news, I found what looked like the usual complement of tourists. There were dozens of film crews, but that's a different matter."

"If history teaches us anything, it is that treating unstable psychopaths as if they are normal, reasonable people doesn’t work. [...] Europe didn’t pick this fight, but we should be in no doubt that Russia under Putin is an unpredictable rogue state."

"Shocking though the Savile revelations are, they have to be seen in a wider context. His behaviour was enabled by a revolution in sexual behaviour that was supposed to liberate both sexes, but actually offered endless opportunities to unscrupulous men. Its effects were far-reaching, creating poisonous attitudes towards victims of sexual abuse that are still being recycled in rape trials today. But it has also prompted a feminist critique that is vital if we’re ever going to understand the context that men like Savile operate in, and stop them at an early stage in their criminal careers."

"The murder of Jo Cox rightly caused an outpouring of emotion, from shocked disbelief to calls for more civility in public discourse. But memories are short, especially in the feverish atmosphere of a Labour leadership contest. I could hardly believe my ears when Owen Smith, in a campaign speech about equality, said he was upset that Labour did not have the power to "smash" Theresa May "back on her heels"."

"The harsh fact is there are not sufficient safeguards in place to identify and discipline police officers who abuse women, yet we are expected to trust the very same men to investigate crimes against the most vulnerable female victims. If women in this country are ever to feel safe – and it is something that should be ours by right – we urgently need a public inquiry into institutional misogyny within the police."

"The last week has been a lesson in the difference between theory and practice. For several years now some feminists have tried to point out the risks posed by unquestioningly accepting claims about gender identity. When we pointed out that self-identification is unverifiable, and open to exploitation by sexual predators, we were shouted down and accused of transphobia. When we argued that vulnerable women prisoners should not have to share intimate spaces with men convicted of sex offences, we were told to think of the feelings of trans prisoners."

"The slogan "trans women are women" admits no ifs or buts. If a man identifies as a woman, even if he has taken no steps towards transitioning, we are supposed to accept that his "gender identity" trumps biological sex. But if Bryson is genuinely trans, rather than a sexual predator gaming the system, this strikes down the claim that trans women never pose a threat to women and can be safely placed in the female prison estate."

"That's me done. I wrote to Keir Starmer and spoke to him in person. I warned him about misogyny. He never replied. Labour has betrayed women with a raft of policies designed to appease trans-identified men. I don't suppose Starmer cares, but I've resigned my membership today."

"Smith’s book [Different for Girls] is, nevertheless, an acute and enjoyable analysis of misreadings and misrepresentations of women in popular culture. Put simply, her argument is that women are far less different from men than the media, religion, politicians, pundits and the fashion world would have it. And indeed there is a kind of ‘new woman’ abroad: a more androgynous, much tougher creature than the postwar or even Sixties model. The new woman, according to Smith, enjoys her own power, her own money, her own sexuality. She can play with self-image without burning her fingers. She is unimpressed by the ever-after promises of marriage (or of men, as it happens) and the easy seductions of motherhood. Smith has often written on the growing numbers of women – one in five, the most reliable figure – who refuse motherhood, and is particularly scathing on the patriarchal implications of infertility treatment."

"The book review lined up to appear in next weekend's Sunday Times seemed to be, in all respects, suitable stuff for the pages of a quality paper. The reviewer: Nigella Lawson, whose copy had been ordered and delivered. The book: an interesting polemical work (Faber & Faber, £9.99), due out on Monday. The author: Joan Smith, a former Sunday Times journalist and, now, coming writer and novelist. So far, so good. Enter Andrew Neil, the editor, whose principled line on the suppression of information and the duty of a free press to publish first, argue afterwards has been ringing around the High Court recently. His foot came down no less firmly at the mid-week editorial conference. That woman’s book was not, repeat not, going to see the light of day in his newspaper. Quail, quail. An interesting example, you might think, of male power exercised over women and their works. By the way, what is Ms Smith's book called? Misogynies, as it happens."

"[We are] absolutely united in our desire to renegotiate with Europe and to have a referendum - and to trust the British people to make up their minds"

"The people have spoken - and they have rejected a hard Brexit."

"We have to call it out...I believe in freedom of the press but everyone has a responsibility not to incite abuse and death threats."

"Somebody like Jacob, with his views on things like abortion, a man who says he's had six children and never changed a nappy, who says that even if you were to be raped by your father you wouldn't have a right to choose to have a termination - I'm sorry, but I couldn't stay in a party led by somebody like him."

"It's a very bleak day for our country. It's as stark as that. He's called the great charlatan for good reason. And he is absolutely shameless in his ability to shift his position."

"This isn't some sideshow. This is serious. We need a new political party and it's absolutely got to be done."

"The internet is being written by men with an agenda [...] Look at a woman's Wikipedia page and you can't believe a word of it."

"The only reason I can have a high-pressure job and a home and see my kids is because my husband works from home. He does the cooking and shopping. [...] You can't have it all. Neither men nor women."

"Racial history lays so heavily on black people – slavery, migration, racism. But I don’t want my characters to be hidden by that…"

"I feel it is something that I have to do for my children, to be able to give them a book that has kids like them in it, just incidentally. They are not the side character, they are not there as a novelty, they are just the characters. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. People need to see themselves reflected in the culture around them."

"There are so many expectations placed upon us, so many restricting places in which we are supposed to place ourselves in order to function in the world. There is often a struggle to hold on to who we are through all of this; either we lose the struggle and we are lost, almost deadened, or we simply don't survive at all…"

"Suicide is generally seen in a very negative way and, though it is tragic and devastating, I've learnt from losing my own twin that there's a positive and magical side to it as well. It's about a person freeing themselves. It is actually a very courageous thing to do. To leave can be braver than to just stay here and struggle on, never knowing whether you'll ever be happy."

"When Susan Finley developed flu-like symptoms, she didn’t go to the doctor because she was frightened about the cost. Finley’s grandparents later found her dead in her apartment. She was 53. Finley did not die as a result of Covid-19. She died in 2016 as a result of America’s healthcare system – a system that led her to avoid treatment for the common flu in order to avoid debt. It is that same system that is currently creaking under the pressure of a pandemic that experts warned was coming but governments failed to prepare for. It is a system that does not qualify for the term “developed”. The United States of America, we are told by everyone from the president to the United Nations, is a . That term, “developed economy”, sounds like an endpoint, like the man standing upright after a series of hunched and hairy iterations. It’s the contrast that makes the definition – developed economies can only really exist if they are compared to their poorer “developing” counterparts. Covid-19 has merely shown the cracks in a very successful marketing campaign about which category the US falls into."

"There are 2.9 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the United States. That’s fewer than Turkmenistan (7.4 beds per 1,000), Mongolia (7.0), Argentina (5.0) and Libya (3.7). In fact, the US ranks 69th out of 182 countries analyzed by the World Health Organization. This lack of hospital beds is forcing doctors across the country to ration care under Covid-19, pushing up the number of preventable deaths. America’s numbers are similarly unimpressive when it comes to medical doctors. The United States has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people, placing it behind Trinidad & Tobago (2.7), and Russia (4.0 doctors per 1,000, for a country that is described as being “in transition”). Life expectancies at birth are lower in the US than they are in Chile or China. The US has a higher maternal mortality rate than Iran or Saudi Arabia."

"It’s not just health. Access to the internet is better in Bahrain and Brunei (two countries the UN does not consider developed economies) than it is in the US. Inequality scores are higher in America than they are in Mali and Yemen. A closer country to America in inequality is Israel, a country which functions as an apartheid state. And the US ranks 81st in the world in terms of women’s political representation. So, you’ve got a better chance of making it into office as a woman if you live in Vietnam, or Albania. Sub-Saharan Africa is most comparable to America – 24% of seats in the region’s parliaments are held by women, the same figure as in the US. In the United States, 83% of students graduate high school. That figure is higher in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Barbados, Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro. None of those countries are considered “developed economies” by the United Nations."

"So why does the United Nations consider the US as a developed economy when its own statistics so clearly suggest otherwise? One might argue that it’s about simple wealth, or gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the economy, per capita. But if that were the measure of development then European countries such as Romania, Hungary and Slovakia should not qualify for the term “developed economy” while Bermuda, Qatar, Singapore and China should all make the list. Besides, GDP per capita is no reliable measure of wellbeing in a country like the US where the richest 5% of people own two-thirds of the national wealth."

"The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not. You cannot charge a woman $39.95 to hold the baby that she has just given birth to. You cannot constantly operate hospitals at close to capacity in order to maximize profits. The pursuit of in systems built for public good has not worked ethically or practically."

"Why does it matter whether a country is defined as developing or not? Because it means that policymakers here can distract voters into thinking that crises are constantly diplomatic, military or trade based when actually the problems that America needs to fix most urgently are right here – they’re the crises of health and education. Had those problems been better addressed, the nation would not be struggling as desperately as it is right now."

"Kneeling is an act of humility, of dedication to something greater, of awe, of reverence. Being at church isn’t essentially about being part of a community—it’s about worshipping God. In worshipping—recognizing God’s true worth and therefore sinking to our knees before him—does in fact bind us as a community, both with one another in the present time and with those who have gone before and will come after us."

"The Communists are Jews, and Russia is being entirely administered by them. They are in every government office, bureau and newspaper. They are driving out the Russians and are responsible for the anti-Semitic feeling which is increasing."

"“What does Ukraine look like?” In the allotted five minutes I tried to give an idea...it’s green and gently rolling, and dotted with medieval fortresses, romantically neglected baroque palaces and monasteries, and quiet, pretty towns and little cities, much like those of Austria or the Czech Republic. Kyiv itself is a grand Belle Époque metropolis with up-and-down cobbled streets and chestnut trees. There are funny little back alleys and courtyards full of coffee shops and art galleries, leafy parks with views over the sprawling river Dnipro, and an array of glorious churches, the grandest of them the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral."

"Saying that Ukraine doesn’t really exist is as absurd as saying that Ireland doesn’t exist because it was long under British rule, or that Norwegians are really Swedes."

"The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one they are magnificently disproving on the battlefield."

"Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomor—literally, “killing by hunger”—a program of forced deportations and food and land requisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation of Ukraine’s rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraine’s urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that this extraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Soviet authorities knew that villagers were dying in great numbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning and forbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns."

"...a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled western part of the country—the first time Russia had ever controlled this territory. Two years later, however, the Wehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrested the Lviv intelligentsia—a rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed."

"For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis..No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too."

"The two hinge moments of Ukraine’s post–Cold War history were two highly effective and genuinely inspirational displays of people power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into the Ukrainian presidency, an effort that seems to have included having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived the attack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantly falsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets in protest and stayed there until the electoral commission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution, were a plot orchestrated by the West."

"In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency, after the pro-European bloc rancorously split. For the next four years, he devoted himself to looting the Ukrainian treasury. But in November 2013, he went a step too far: just as Ukraine was about to ink a long-planned and widely popular trade deal with the European Union, he abruptly canceled it and, under pressure from Putin, announced a partnership with Russia instead."

"A protest camp on Kyiv’s central square, known as the Maidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January 2014, the police began a violent crackdown, which climaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 police officers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of his luxurious private compound—Hermès dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lion—went on display in Ukraine’s National Art Museum."

"In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovych’s flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actions had the opposite effect."

"Ukraine’s progress before the invasion should not be overstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind the scenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasive corruption. (Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico and Zambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.)"

"As during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Maidan protests, which came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine’s fierce self-defense today is a defense of values, not of ethnic identity or of some imagined glorious past."

"Ukraina is literally translated as “on the edge” or “borderland”, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th, between Russia and Austria through the 19th, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it had never been an independent state."

"But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves."

"Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia.'"

"“The ‘real’ Ukraine, the Ukraine that has outlived armies and ideologies, lies in the countryside. Half an hour’s drive out of the city one enters a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights. The people here live off their own pigs and cows, fruit-trees and hives; they drink themselves to death on home-brewed vodka, roll cigarettes out of old newspapers, and curse ‘American spaceships’ for dropping Colorado beetles on the potato-plants.”"

"Being ‘Ukrainian’, for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian."

"“One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva: 28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.”"

"Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially."

"Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go. They were total scumbags, but it's over. O-V-A-H."

"Before we go any further, I'm warned that any criticism of Assange will land me in the doghouse with those somehow still able to take him 100% seriously, and may even cause a section of commentators to suspect I am part of some Guardian plot against him. The reality is a thousand times less intriguing, alas, and may even land me in the doghouse with the Guardian."

"And so to Sweden, a country Assange regarded as so perilously likely to FedEx him to the US that he travelled there frequently until he was accused of rape in it."

"I don't really care for the phrase "sowing division" as far as [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]] is concerned. "Sowing" implies a sort of precision to the planting, when in fact Galloway just sprays division around like some porphyric roué who can't be bothered to find the urinal."

"The rapturous standing ovation at the end of Liz Truss’s conference speech looked straight out of a future Netflix documentary from the cults strand. Outside the sect’s meeting hall, the party is polling an average of 25 (TWENTY-FIVE) points behind Labour. Inside, the people were clapping like they’d just heard a really charismatic argument about why it’s important to marry teenage girls, shun dissenting family members, and build gun turrets round their compound. Truss’s government is now too weak to implement its maddest plans and too ideological to implement its most sensible. Last night it emerged that the government has blocked a public information campaign to help people save money on energy – and, by extension, to conserve usage in the face of suggestions that rolling blackouts could be in the post for this winter. Apparently Truss regarded it as too nannying, despite it having been drawn up by her own business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg (a 53-year-old who admittedly still has a nanny). One cabinet minister reportedly said "the public is smarter than you think". Unfortunately, Liz Truss isn’t. If we do reach the blackout scenario, the failure to plan or use foresight will be blamed on Vladimir Putin."

"Yet discounting the minority of republicans, British public opinion appears to have divided the king and queen consort and his sons and their wives into two categories: "obviously tortured and damaged and miserable but enduring it for their whole lives out of duty" (good) and "obviously tortured and damaged and miserable but saying so out loud and at length" (bad). What a sad state of affairs that all seems, though it’s always amusing to read frothing online comments from people whose personal understanding of duty extends to the tax on booze. Above all, this epochal saga reminds us that there is more than one way to look at that chilling term for the monarchy, "the institution". We might pity the institution’s inmates and escapees, or be horrified by them, or turn a blind eye to the inherent coldnesses and cruelties of their existence. But we are, at the dawn of 2023, part of the society where the majority thinks that it’s probably the best place for them."

"Liz Truss is now eluded by two major types of growth: economic and personal. The past few days have seen the former prime minister break her welcome silence with what her allies call a series of "interventions". The one intervention that doesn’t seem to have happened is the type where they sit you down and give you the hard truths about your behaviour. That treatment oversight has resulted in a spectacle of lavishly preposterous blame-shifting and self-delusion."

"[B]oth the previous two prime ministers – Truss and Boris Johnson – are at this game. We live in an era where people who have got all the way to the highest office in the land now hilariously claim structural discrimination against the fact that, after varying amounts of time, they just weren't good enough. When both of these chancers left office, they had not simply passed their best-before date – they had sailed beyond the use-by date and moved formally into the realms of biohazard. Yet instead of bucking the f up and accepting this, they have turned into the political equivalent of "incels" – involuntarily rejected by the people who determine whether or not you get to be prime minister, and bleating about it in self-reflection-free style on every available forum."

"Courtesy of the Daily Mail, Johnson has just accepted the position of "newspaper columnist", an extremely silly job, which in large part involves implying you'd do it better if only they'd give you a turn running the country. As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, surely we have tested the central premise of that one to destruction."

"For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school."

"And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn't have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. ... Dear 2008 Marina: you think you’re being clever but you’re being horribly obtuse. Get your head out of your arse. It doesn't matter whether or not they heard it, it’s still hideous and they have every right to think it’s absolutely unacceptable for the BBC to have aired it."

"I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing."

"You know, almost every time I've ever written about Richard Branson over the years, he or one of his lackeys has written in to the Guardian to whine about it, and often got the letter printed. This time, I'm actively begging him to get in touch. Come on, Richard – write in and tell us why you didn't bother Googling why your friend with the best lawyers out there still got an 18-month prison sentence, and had, at the time of that email, settled many widely reported civil lawsuits brought against him by victims? I'll save you a space on the letters page."

"At the heart of my mother's death, it turns out, there had been a big secret after all. She had wanted very much to die at home. She had feared the final ravages of disease which might frighten her children and demean her dignity. So she had obtained a pill that would kill her. The night she died had been planned in advance; she chose her moment, and took her own life. It meant she knew she was saying goodbye when we said good night for the last time. Her closest friends had been told as well. While the four of us slept, the terrible drama of their final goodbyes was being played out in her bedroom, and when we woke the next day, thinking fate had taken its course, we were quite wrong. Our father had known he would be breaking the news all along. Did it matter? At first I wasn't sure. Our mother's belief in a person's right to control the moment of their death was well known, for she had taken part in a World In Action documentary six months before her death, and been a powerful advocate. But I'd taken her argument for hypothesis, never dreaming she had found the means to make it real. My mother had decided we must not be told."

"As chief interviewer for The Sunday Times, it is my job to be the pitcher. What I've learnt from interviewing people for a living is that the quality of any conversation is determined not by what someone thinks they have to say, but by what someone else asks them. In my experience, even the dreariest interviewee will eventually come out with something interesting. My job is to try to find it. Take a look around the room at any party and you will see women — heads cocked, expressions attentive — trying their best to find it too. Only they're not getting paid. Yet however tiresome the gender question gap is for women, it is a big problem for men, for it must explain why so many struggle to make meaningful male friendships. A rewarding conversation requires at least one party to be curious about the other. If neither asks a single question, both are doomed to bore each other."

"It is clear enough where Mrs Whitehouse stands - and, indeed Judge King-Hamilton, who 'could not imagine...a more scurrilous profanity'. Most of us, I suppose - Gay News included - are a bit less sure of ourselves. One especially interesting feature of this case was how united the observers - and in particular the press - were against the prosecution, and in particular against Mr John Smyth's conduct of the case. Of course the press benches are parti pris where the freedom of the press is in question. One of our heroes is Clarence Darrow; one of our texts the Scopes case, when he defended a teacher accused of corrupting children's minds with the Darwinian theory of evolution. This case, though, involved Christianity, homosexuality, and obscenity. It was a perfect trio for the prosecution, who could imply, though not state, that the defendants were not just blasphemers but filthy-minded deviants as well. But not one of us, from an extreme disbeliever to a devout Catholic, welcomed the verdict. As far as we were concerned, the prosecution had, at the least, deliberately introduced irrelevancies to discredit the character of the paper."

"Sheila Aitkenhead is 38, has four children, and is consumed by various cancers. She is unbelievably pretty and healthy and sensible. When would she like to kill herself? "The point at which I simply represent distress." Her children had been told. I wanted dreadfully, interferingly, to know what they thought about it. But we weren't told; oddly, it is all supposed to be so open."

"Under the pseudo-Gothic vaults, brightly hatted, lace stockinged, discreetly jewelled, the 27 womwen Members go clicking over the tiled floors. ... Highly educated, immensely hard working, more dedicated, more conscientious than many of their male colleagues these women hold down one of the most demanding jobs there is. Many of them are married, a few have small children and some have households organised beyond the dreams of Mrs Beeton. And all of them have one regret — that there are no more than 24 hours in a day. Time is an enemy. Watching telly by the fireside becomes a rare treat, an evening at the theatre something to be planned for weeks in advance, and then frustrated. They need energy, energy, and more energy. This is no life for fluttery ladies with migraine[s] and female complaints. Life at the House is not yet geared to women. The men have their built in barber but they have no hairdresser, what do you do when your hair droops and your on television that evening? They share one bath between them. They have no office of their own."

"In my early teens, skinny ribs daily rent asunder by the explosive emotions within - oh golly gosh how I hate that spotty, mingy Mildred and will Rock Hudson ever ever clasp me in his steely arms - I burst upon a diary with a great gold lock. But the Moroccan leather binding, the milky expanse within, instantly transformed me into Baroness Munchausen. My very handwriting spiked into the serious trembly copperplate I deemed more suitable for the consumptive heroine I wished to be than the thick round letters of the large schoolgirl I was (if experts today are right and handwriting shapes the fortunes of the writer, I should have died elegantly at the end of the diary). Even the contents were bastard - I found it beneath my dignity to write of anything but the most searing Brontë-esque passions and now, far from being a record of day-to-day events, each entry requires a simultaneous translation: "Today I think I shall go mad, I shiver, I groan, I sob" (Myron Fickelburger didn’t sit next to me in Chemistry); "Wild gales sweep across the moors, I run and howl, my eyes stream tears" (it’s windy in the playground and I’ve got this bit of asphalt in my eye). Discovered long hence, that diary would provide historians with a vivid and haunting picture of youthful stress in the fifties - vivid and haunting and deeply untrue."

"It would be a tragedy if the still embryonic Women's Liberation Movement in this country sank without trace into the amniotic fluid of niceness, but already I detect some signs. The women directly concerned with organising the March 6 demo, though they point with pride to the massive WL movement in the US seem not to have learned very much from the performance of their American sisters. They bend over backwards to be fair. ('We must be very careful not to assume that if a woman is refused a job it is sexual discrimination' — why? It's not our job to worry about fairness.) They talk too much about wanting to be taken seriously; they say too often how much they deprecate extremes and shudder with refined horror at bra-burnings, and at SCUM and WITCH. Not at at the image we want, they say, metaphorically crooking their little fingers and adjusting their petal hats. We don't want to go to jail, or worse, be laughed at. The tendency among these ladies is to sneer at the Germaine Greers of the movement and, indeed, it is easy enough to carp at sweeping genralisations and lack of careful factual research. But anger, neurosis, insights , obsession and extremism is where it is at and women will have lost the battle before it has begun if they reject all this and concentrate their energies only on concrete injustice. Reforms like equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception, better nursery schools, have needed implementation as long as I can remember, and armies of hard-working, dedicated women have been pushing them forward as long as I can remember, too, and a great deal longer. The only new ingredient Women's Lib had to offer was the intellectual recognition of an imprisoned psyche, and the realisation that when that inner battle is fought and won, concrete injustices crumble at the roots. And that is not done by being nice. American liberationists did not surge into life thinking of the other chap's point of view or making constant efforts to be fair, moderate, cool and ladylike. They succeeded by being prejudiced, unfair, immoderate, uncool and devastatingly unladylike and they came up with the only symbolic image of the movement so far (em) bra-burning. A small and risible thing, perhaps, but their own."

"She [Tweedie] opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."

"From the word go, Tweedie, 'the doyenne of feminist journalists bringing the hottest of bulletins from the front line of the sex war' (ibid) [See note below] was both partisan and subjective/ Although reserved about detaikls of her life, especially the tragedy of her children, she mined other experiences. Her style, too, was the radical opposite of the remote discoursew which passed for objective journalism. She wrote as she spoke and the words jumped off the page, full of colloquialisms and inner dialogue."

"Her weekly column became an icon of all that was hairy and terrifying to men who found the women's movement a threat to their security. She was parodied, ridiculed and attacked. Mostly, though, she became a focal voice of women all over Britain who wrote to her in their thousands and took courage from her to look at the truth about their lives. ... Her radicalism never wavered but her honesty demanded that she explore the ambivalences feminists like her were scarcely able to confess to themselves, let alone to the world. The result was "Letters From A Faint-hearted Feminist", a new series of columns in which issues of central feminist ideology were put through the same critical wringer as the unthinking patriarchal orthodoxies that had been in her earlier columns. Could not you wear high heels with a boiler suit? Were beautiful clothes a gorgeous prison, or a legitimate choice for independent women? Was monogamy inevitably a road to servitude? The cleverness of those columns was Jill's ability to admit to ambivalence, to weakness and to changing her mind without compromising her beliefs in equality, independence and the destructiveness of stereotypes. In their way, they were a bridge between the revolutionary battlefields of the 70s and the next generation who rightly took their freedoms for granted and saw no reason whatever to agonise about boiler suits or PhDs."

"Our model is the amazing Jill Tweedie, a former columnist on the Guardian. Her close friend Polly Toynbee told me that after a diagnosis of motor neurone disease – the condition that drove Diane Pretty to battle for the right to die – Jill calmly acquired the medication needed for a sure and safe despatch. She booked herself into a hospice for what she told her family was a short respite and took her tablets whilst she was still capable of self administration, but in a setting where it would be professionals who would find her body rather than those close to her."

"[[Germaine Greer|[Germaine] Greer]]'s new book is an exciting reminder of how discrimination against women stops them, physically, from being 'the whole woman'. 'Your cellulite is you,' she says. It might sound obvious; but what a thrill to talk about owning our bodies, about being who we are. This is where the equality-seekers get it wrong, and liberationists like Greer get it right. Because how we feel about our bodies has an impact on whether we get paid the same. Of course we'll never get equal status if we're spending all our time and energy worrying about our thighs. Of course we'll never get equal pay if we ask for it wearing a baby-doll slip. What has equality legislation done for women anyway? The Equal Pay Act came into force 29 years ago and yet a woman still earns 79p for every £1 a man earns doing the same job. Women may be entering the workforce in record numbers, but with little pay and no security. Saying we should concentrate only on equal pay doesn't even get you equal pay."

"The scandal of the medicalisation of birth is not new; from the 1960s, activists such as Ina May Gaskin and Sheila Kitzinger have fought against the interventionist tide that sees birth as an illness, rather than part of a woman's "wellness cycle". But it is a scandal that has reached extraordinary proportions: in 30 years, the Caesarean rate in Britain has more than trebled; one baby in five is now delivered this way. (The US figure varies from 50% for healthy, middle-class women in their 30s and 40s in private hospitals, to between 1% and 15% for those in public hospitals.) Of course, Britain is different from America in that the market does not rule healthcare - US hospitals get a $1,000 bonus for every epidural requested. But the story is absolutely relevant here, with doctors under increasing pressure to avoid litigation, a severe shortage of midwives, the increasing popularity of elective Caesareans for women who are constantly told that vaginal childbirth is traumatic and terrible, and the threats of private interests entering the health service."

"I must respect myself; after all, I wash my hair with Fructis. Similar justifications lie behind the rise in cosmetic surgery (up 50% in the past five years in Britain): that it makes women feel better about themselves, complete, free from their flaws. While women flock to surgeons to have gruesome operations with often calamitous consequences, while cosy Boots the chemist offers injections of poison to paralyse expression muscles in the face, the surgery spin meisters sell it as a quasi-feminist act to take control of your body."

"Say no to the mutilation of your flesh with knives, vacuum suction and poison, and that means you are irresponsible."

"The classic example of such a coloniser was Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed's seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical things to say on the "mind of the Oriental". But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam treated women. It was Islam's degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was the "fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation," he said. The Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilised" by disposing of the veil. And what did this forward-thinking, feminist-sounding veil-burner do when he got home to Britain? He founded and presided over the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, which tried, by any means possible, to stop women getting the vote. Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian mores represented the pinnacle of civilisation, and set about implementing this model wherever they went - with women in their rightful, subservient place, of course. They wanted merely to replace eastern misogyny with western misogyny."

"The second low point, I remember very clearly, was on February 9. I was way behind schedule, so took a day's holiday from work with the aim of reading three novels - one each in the morning, afternoon and evening. The first book was Anne Tyler's fabulous The Amateur Marriage, which was about mistakes and regret and which I found deeply affecting. I cried in my local cafe. The second book was Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, a superb but cruel book about terrible things. I sobbed the entire time I was reading it. This was in a different cafe. That evening, at home, I read Stella Duffy's devastating novel about terminal cancer and death, and how it is worse to die than be left behind, and, well, I could hardly walk. The trouble with really good novels is that they make you engage, make you experience the emotions of the characters as if they were your own. It was a terrible day, and yet these remained three favourites for me throughout the judging process."

"Youth crime is an obsession for today's politicians, but in a small town in the 1980s there didn't seem to be much about. I came across drugs only when I met some wild boys from the exotic metropolis that is Thirsk. The violent crime I heard about, meanwhile, was largely distant and always terrifying: at primary school I was petrified of the Yorkshire Ripper until he was caught in 1981; later I was deeply troubled by the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh in 1986. The crimes the young people I knew were committing were the taping of the Top 20 from the radio (which was made especially glamorous because of the urban myth that someone from Leeds had gone to jail for it), underage drinking and smoking dope. No one I knew was arrested. However, my diary held a pleasing reminder that even a goody-two-shoes high-achiever like me got into trouble with the law. Our school, a Yorkshire state school, had made it to the London finals of a debating competition, previously the preserve of top public schools. The team was Simon, my political enemy (he was Tory, I was Labour; today he is a New Labour councillor), and me. We won, and to celebrate Simon and I and our supporters took over a flat in Fleet Street to which someone had the key, drank until the sun came up and were visited by the police at 5am, just as a fellow pupil was demonstrating how to wear an elephant-trunk thong he had bought earlier. Who could complain about the youth of today?"

"[On preparing the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie with Alan Rickman] But the quantity of the material left us with a series of questions. How much of Rachel’s life before she went to Gaza should we include? And should we quote other people? The trend in political theatre, from David Hare’s The Permanent Way to Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo, is journalistic: the use of testimony, of interviews and on-the-record material rather than invention. But for us there could be no re-interviewing to fill in the gaps. We had a finite amount of words to work with, as Rachel was dead. I was very keen to use some of the emails that Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig, sent to their daughter while she was in Gaza. They are full of the kind of worries any parent might have if their child was in a dangerous situation, but because Rachel never came home, they have a devastating poignancy. ... And what about the voices of Rachel’s friends? I interviewed many fellow ISM activists, most of whom have been deported from Israel since her death. We watched tapes of two of the moving memorial services: one in Gaza, which was shot at by the Israeli army, another in Olympia. We viewed documentaries on the subject, most notably Sandra Jordan’s powerful The Killing Zone, and considered using video grabs. But in the end the power of Rachel’s writing meant that, apart from a few short passages quoting her parents and an eye witness report of her death, her words were strong enough to stand alone."

"Being open can bring you great scoops, too. My favourite example of this was during the 2009 London protests against the G20 meeting, when our reporter, Paul Lewis, was investigating what happened to a newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who had collapsed and died while walking through the protests. The pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. We were searching for eyewitnesses. We put callouts on Twitter and on the Guardian site, and within hours Paul was contacted by a Guardian reader in the US. This man was an investment fund manager who had been in London on business; he'd slipped out of his meetings to have a look at the protests, and film them on his smartphone. On reading our callout at his home in New York, he looked back at his footage, and discovered very clear images showing Ian Tomlinson being shoved to the ground by a policeman. As you can imagine, it was a big scoop. Although the police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, he was later dismissed for gross misconduct. The pathologist has been struck off. In August the police settled a civil action by the Tomlinson family by issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay compensation. None of this would have happened if the Guardian hadn't been open to the web, with international reach."

"I once asked if a friend, a teacher from Huddersfield, could cook for him so that she could put it on her CV – "cooked for Alan Rickman" (it made sense at the time). He not only said yes, but acted as her sous-chef and rustled up a top politician and a Hollywood actor as fellow guests. When asked recently about his proudest Royal Court moment, his answer was not about him: he said it was when he took Rachel Corrie’s parents outside the front of the theatre to show them their late daughter’s name in neon lights."

"When she was appointed the first female [Guardian] Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women's issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence."

"[B]ack in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England. As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns. I took the story to the Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled "Islamophobic"."

"Viner likes to deny it but there are antisemites on the daily's staff and she has not had the courage to face them down. For years now I have made a point of sending her a back channel email each time the Guardian has published another outrage. It will be a joy to know that I'm not a part of that anymore."

"Viner's pursuit of the Tortoise deal has been absurd and deranged [...] It represents a failure of duty of care to her staff, and crass mismanagement. To value the Observer brand at £1 is craven. And [[w:James Harding (journalist)|[James] Harding's]] Tortoise deal doesn't stack up."

"There was something unsettling about the serried ranks of New Labour women elected on 1 May last year [1997]. All those structured smiles and cheerful jackets gathered round our leader made me feel like a bad-tempered Daily Mail reader or one of those glorious man-hating feminists of myth who live in Hackney and refuse to shave their legs. What I hadn’t realised was that this unmonstrous regiment of women came much closer to representing the end of something – feminism as a natural ally of radical politics – than to representing a key moment in the long march through the institutions. Nor had I imagined that so many of them would become part of that blancmange known as one-nation politics. There are many reasons why they have proved such a disappointment. Personal ambition is one. Most new MPs live in fear of marginalisation, of being banished to the Siberia of consistently applied principle, of having to face up to the fact that they will never be a bag-carrier for an Under-Secretary of State. Sisterly solidarity, too, plays a part. Top Labour women are ferociously loyal to each other, but their loyalty has so far furthered no cause greater than the right of cabinet ministers to send their children to selective schools or to have their minds changed over tobacco sponsorship of Formula One."

"I did not start out in state schools. Like so many children of Labour politicians in the 60s, my brothers and I began our education in the private sector. My parents, Tony and Caroline Benn, decided to move us all to state schools around 1963 on the grounds that it was hypocritical to back comprehensives for everyone else and then educate your own children privately. In some people's eyes, this made us four children a collective sacrifice, a living social experiment. We felt only lucky. Our nearest comprehensive was Holland Park, which cynics so enjoyed deriding as a showcase comprehensive and therefore a place of privilege. (If I had a pound for the number of times people have said to me, "Holland Park? Oh that wasn't a real comprehensive!" I could have paid for a year of private schooling, easy.) Holland Park was one of the first purpose-built comprehensives in the country but it was also, by the time I got there in the late 60s, a large rumbustious institution, which drew in a small, albeit highly publicised, section of the middle class who lived around the school. Some of these, like my mother, Caroline, became passionately committed to both the school itself - she was governor of Holland Park for 35 years - and the wider comprehensive cause. My brother Hilary remembers the strangeness of arriving at Holland Park for the first time after attending Westminster preparatory school, where he and my eldest brother Stephen had been usefully designated as Benn I and Benn II. He can still remember how huge the school buildings looked to him and the strange sound of so many boys - and girls - laughing and running and talking in the vast playgrounds."

"A quarter of a century on, the Grunwick dispute remains one of the most significant in modern industrial history. In a sense, the strike was typical of a pattern of similar disputes before and since: a factory with a few hundred workers, a slowly building sense of injustice and a long standoff between employer and worker. But even then, Grunwick seemed a different kind of battle. This was a historic meeting between a traditional trade unionism, still relatively sure of its power, and a growing band of black and Asian workers who were beginning to find an industrial and political voice. Arthur Scargill bought down his Yorkshire miners in a bus - there was even fighting talk of shutting the pits. Grunwick workers travelled to more than 2,000 workplaces over 40 weeks to enlist support. The strike seemed to draw in every progressive movement of the day. "Black and white unite and fight" demanded the banners in Chapter road. Socialist feminists did their picket duty and wrote sternly of the military tactics of their trade union brothers. Jayaben Desai, in her sari and white cardigan, handbag crooked over her arm, was a feminist heroine of the age. Yet perhaps the most lasting consequence of Grunwick and other mass disputes during the 1970s were some of the anti-union laws of the 1980s, particularly those outlawing mass pickets. Today, it is possible to see more clearly the fraud that lay at the heart of the argument advanced by what was then called the "new right", particularly over Grunwick. A few hundred Asian men and women asking for the right to join a union and negotiate from within it was hardly the best example of an overweening and arrogant union movement it claimed was running the country. By any reckoning, Grunwick was a just cause, whose supporters included moderates such as Shirley Williams. In 1977, an independent court of inquiry chaired by Lord Scarman criticised mass picketing but upheld the workers' claim to union recognition. But it was a lost cause: George Ward, the Grunwick owner, refused to give in. This, despite a last-ditch hunger strike by Mrs Desai and four colleagues on the steps of the TUC. The strike fizzled out in early 1978. No walkout since, bar the miners' strike of 1984-5, has quite achieved Grunwick's fame or progressive significance. In the early 1980s, I went to a small factory near Birmingham to cover a similar dispute, led by a group of Asian workers protesting about pay and conditions and the right to union recognition. This time, the streets were empty. As union power declined, so did media coverage - if there's no punch-up, so what?"

"If a week is a long time in politics, a century can seem surprisingly short. With uncanny timing, the centenary of the death of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader and arguably its most towering figure, falls at the end of this month, on the very weekend that Labour delegates will gather in Brighton for this year’s annual conference, the first under the party’s new leader."

"When it comes to the politics of agitation, Jeremy Corbyn is Hardie’s clear heir. Were Hardie alive in the 21st century he would surely have opposed the Iraq war, visited the Occupy encampments, supported those activists fighting against the "social cleansing" of London and denounced austerity. A charismatic public speaker who frequently addressed huge crowds, he would have recognised the enthusiasm and fervour of the mass audiences that Corbyn has attracted across the country, which so many thought dead in the age of Twitter and Facebook."

"But Hardie’s political trajectory also serves as an important warning to any contemporary radical leader in parliament, the one bit of the job many claim Corbyn cannot do. A strong believer in representative democracy, Hardie nonetheless loathed the deal-making and elitism of parliament itself and was widely acknowledged as a poor leader of the party in the Commons for the very short period he undertook the job from 1906 to 1907."

"There’s no doubt that a Corbyn win would pose an enormous challenge for the centre-right of the party, but the many MPs who oppose him can surely sit on their hands or plot, or both, for only so long. The task is even greater for the member for Islington North, borne in on a wave of popular feeling. If his leadership were to succeed, it would need to be exceptionally generous, imaginative and inclusive. It would have to forge fresh alliances, take surprising positions and make unexpected compromises. Hardie the seer, the agitator, inspires those of us who believe Labour needs to present a bolder alternative to the Conservatives. Hardie the diffident party leader reminds us that we still have a lot to learn about how to shape “divine discontent” into a credible and popular programme."

"I arrived in the camp having thrown up more than I ever had, so somebody said drink some water. We went to our respective beds and the bush toilet was a long way away and the kerosene lamp had gone out. So I did what any camper does and thought I'll just step this way closer to the bushes and go to the loo - slightly forgetting that everything was recorded and on infra-red camera. I was extremely unwell and thought that rather than throw up over camp I'd go for a quick wee-stop in the jungle."

"I'd never thought about my gender identity before. It hadn't occurred to me that not being a "girly" girl meant I wasn't 100 per cent woman. The point, I've always believed, is to expand the categories "man" and "woman", to tear down pink and blue prisons. So a little girl can like trucks, spacemen, getting dirty and still be a girl; a boy can put on nail polish, play with dolls and be no less a boy."

"The International Olympic Committee's rule changes on transgender athletes have been applauded as a human rights victory. No longer will trans-females be required to have surgery. To take part in women’s events, they need only declare themselves female and keep their testosterone levels below 10 nmol/L for a year before competing. Arne Ljungqvist of the IOC’s medical committee welcomed this as "more flexible and more liberal". And it is great news — unless you are a woman athlete. Testosterone levels in healthy men range between 7.5 and 25 nmol/L. Normal levels in women range from 0.20 to 3 nmol/L. So a male-to-female trans athlete will be allowed to have more than three times the upper range of this performance-enhancing hormone than a born woman. And while taking female hormones reduces male muscle mass and bone density, many biological advantages remain. Men have bigger skeletons, longer stride, larger lung capacity, and a narrower pelvis — unhindered by female reproductive organs — all better suited for speed."

"TERF stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. But lately the definition has expanded to include any woman worried that permitting men who "self-identify" as female to enter women’s changing rooms or refuges unchallenged makes her less safe."

"So at Speakers’ Corner trans activists and feminists were chanting and taunting each other. Maria was taking photographs when an opponent grappled with her, snatched her camera and smashed it on the ground. Then a tall, male-bodied, hooded figure wearing make-up rushed over, hit her several times and as police arrived, ran away. I asked a young activist if she was OK with men smacking women: "It’s not a guy, you’re a piece of s*** and I’m happy they hit her", came the reply."

"[T]rans demands and women’s rights are often in such clear and irreconcilable conflict. Take Martin Ponting, jailed in 1995 for raping two girls, one disabled. After cosmetic surgery, but still possessing male genitalia, Ponting, now called Jessica Winfield, was moved to Bronzefield women’s prison but after making unwanted sexual advances to inmates has been segregated. Are you appalled that a rapist is confined with women prisoners, mainly non-violent offenders and themselves often victims of male sexual abuse? Do you think the Soham murderer Ian Huntley should never be allowed to transfer even if, as reported, he calls himself "Lian"? Then you too are a TERF and deserve to be punched."

"So when is it OK to punch a woman? When she won’t do what you want; when you don’t like what she says. Some things never change."

"[T]he current trans movement is doctrinaire, uncompromising. Led by mainly older trans-women — ie born men — it won’t acknowledge women's rights or feelings. It fights for two principles. First, "self-definition": a person is the gender they "feel" inside, so a trans-woman "is" a woman even without physical change or while retaining male genitalia. Second, "affirmation": everyone must acknowledge this inner gender identity. Hence the right to waltz into women’s private spaces is sacrosanct."

"This craze to expedite gender transition in children goes against all clinical advice for "watchful waiting". The young brain evolves, children change their minds, puberty is troubling for many reasons. Yet the Scottish guidance allows no one to dispute a child's view, maybe acquired on Reddit and Tumblr, that he or she is in "the wrong body". Or to suggest that a child may simply be gay. The apparatus of medical transition, a hormone regime causing sterility, plus surgical removal of healthy tissue, is seen as wholly positive. PE teachers must tolerate girls using binders to strap down their hated breasts "which can lead to shortness of breath and can be painful during physical exertion" because they have "a positive impact on a young person's mental health". We are being ordered to endorse a practice reminiscent of Chinese foot-binding or the Victorian tight-lacing craze where girls fainted to achieve the tiniest waist. Should we also hand out fresh razor blades so self-harm wounds don’t go septic? Or "affirm" anorexics' delusions that they are fat?"

"[On the case of Karen White, born Stephen Wood (and retaining male genitals), a sexual offender against children and on remand as a rapist. White had admitted in court to the rapes committed before being held in custody.] I’d love to meet those who signed off this decision. What would they say to the four women who, within days of her transfer to New Hall prison in West Yorkshire, White had sexually assaulted? Confining a rapist in a women’s prison, among vulnerable inmates including rape victims, is like locking a fox in a henhouse. Yet they merely followed government guidelines "that prisoners should generally be housed in the estate that matches their expressed gender"."

""It never happens," women were told when they worried that losing sex-segregated private spaces might allow attacks by predatory men. Yet, as FoI [Freedom of Information] requests by The Sunday Times last week showed, 90 per cent of sexual assaults in leisure centres are committed in gender-neutral changing rooms and only a tenth in single-sex facilities. It happens."

"This is not a piffling problem. The BBC reality check team confirmed that 60 (48 per cent) of the 125 trans prisoners in jails are sex offenders. That compares with 19 per cent in the prison population overall. Yet, since women commit only 2 per cent of sex crimes, out of 8,000 women prisoners there are only 125 sex offenders. So if the 60 trans sex offenders were housed according to gender identity, it would create a sea change in women’s prisons. There would be 50 per cent more sex offenders; they’d be male bodied, physically stronger and have committed far more serious crimes, including 27 rapes, 13 sexual assaults and seven charges of sex with a child."

"When you write about really difficult and toxic subjects it really helps to have your newspaper behind you and I just want to thank the Times ... who have been completely behind me in dealing with something that is complicated. I have a privilege in being able to write about this difficult subject, which is not something women in universities have at the moment, and I urge that we debate this more thoroughly and freely."

"It is time for every dispossessed Labour member who left because of antisemitism or Momentum bullying to rejoin. If Corbyn’s declared period of navel-gazing is long enough they’ll qualify to vote in a new leader. Let centrist entryism begin. When Johnson toured Doncaster market in August his reception was enthusiastic but stall-holders were puzzled: "He had his head down, he didn’t say hello," some said. For the PM, the working-class north is a dragon he bought drunk on eBay. It scares him, he doesn’t understand it — he knows it’s not really his."

"On election eve, the Guardian journalist and Momentum activist Owen Jones posted a photograph of himself in a grinning thumbs-up with a young woman whose T-shirt slogan read: "Will suck d*** for socialism." I apologise for the crudeness. But reading this filled me (and many others) with disgust and despair. Not just because it took the old Stokely Carmichael notion that a woman’s place in the revolution is "prone" and rebranded it as woke feminism. But because it encapsulated the worst of Corbyn Labour: believing a crass, narcissistic social media clique, which it allowed to act as party proxies on radio or TV, was a useful electoral tool. Here was Jones, a Labour insider with a million Twitter followers and a national newspaper column, writing about women giving sexual favours for votes as Britain went to the polls. I thought of the words on a magnificent Dockers Union banner: "We shall not cease until all destitution, prostitution and exploitation is swept away" and wondered how Labour fell so low."

"At a Notting Hill party the Saturday after the referendum, I had a stand-up barney with a Labour MP. "It’s a disaster!" he cried. "We need a second vote right away." Other guests nodded gravely, but I couldn’t contain myself. Hang on, I said, are you saying a democratic decision is invalid because you lost? "It’s appalling," he wailed. "It can’t happen!" Thus began my life for the next five years. I voted Remain – "with no illusions" as we used to say when I was a student Trot – but I was raised in Doncaster North, a Red Wall seat. I saw the gradual untethering of traditional Labour supporters in my own late father. In 2009, after the local party was discredited by the Donnygate expenses scandal, he voted to make a so-called English Democrat mayor. My father, and millions like him, had little in common with bien pensant London lefties whom I call friends. A reckoning was coming. What surprised me wasn’t the result, but the reckless determination of Remainers to reverse it. Did they think 17 million people would just accept their votes being cancelled? If Remain had won, would they have been cool with Nigel Farage demanding a rerun? The contempt for Brexit voters – that they were thick, old racists, from shitty places – disgusted me."

"In her book Material Girls, Stock asserts that although a person’s professed "gender identity" should be respected, biological sex is immutable and, in some circumstances — prisons, rape counselling, sports — must take precedence to protect women’s rights. This mainstream opinion is protected under the 2010 Equality Act. Yet her persecutors believe trans people literally change sex. They believe that in granting her academic freedom, the university fails to be trans inclusive. "We are not up for debate," they say. That such unscientific, magical thinking has become sacrosanct is calamitous for academics, especially feminist scholars who study how women are historically oppressed via their reproductive role. An Edinburgh lecturer in gender and education tells me she offered students both LGBTQ and feminist reading materials. "As with any subject, I tell them to examine all sides, to think, talk, then form a considered view." For this she was reported to the staff Pride network, which solicits student complaints, and then quietly dropped from lecturing on gender. Across British campuses women academics — and it is always women — face threats, witch-hunts and lost livelihoods for holding gender critical views."

"Stock is no right-wing bigot but a mild-mannered, dry-humoured, left-wing lesbian. An acclaimed philosopher who received an OBE last year, she teaches trans students, respecting their pronouns, and has written repeatedly in support of their human rights. It is bleakly ironic that she is accused of "endangering" others just for holding heretical views, when police have warned her to stay off campus and take security measures for her personal safety."

"When Andrea, a Metropolitan Police constable, was summoned into a room by her inspector he stood up, she assumed, to greet her politely. Instead he lunged, grabbing her breasts and forcing his hands into her underwear. She froze, then aimed a kick at his groin and fled. Andrea hadn't intended to report him — "you shut up and put up with it. If you speak out, you’re finished" — but she confided in a colleague who did. Compelled to pursue a complaint, a 30-month ordeal began which ended in her dismissal for discreditable conduct in 2020. The inspector kept his job."

"Almost daily in the Met, Andrea witnessed what in any other workplace would bring a visit from HR or even instant dismissal. She was paired with an officer who liked to park near secondary schools to ogle teenage girls’ breasts; colleagues constantly watched porn on their phones; a PC, convicted of gross indecency for masturbating on a train, kept his job; men would return from domestic violence scenes saying the victim was mad and deserved a slap. If Andrea failed to laugh at such banter, colleagues would ask: "Are you on your period?" If she left her notebook lying around she'd find a penis drawn inside. Older women were "Dorises" or "white goods" (ie domestic appliances). When a young tourist disappeared, men gathered around the computer to gawp at her photograph, one saying: "She’s locked in my sex dungeon at home." When the station carpet was treated for a flea infestation they joked: "It’s for Andrea’s crabs.""

"Clearly the GRR has far-reaching implications for women. But what happens when they point this out? First, the bombastic know-alls who've ignored every female writer, lawyer and policymaker for five years pull out their manly opinions. Like Alastair Campbell, who chided Laura Kuenssberg for an interview with Sir Keir Starmer in which she dwelt on the GRR, which affects half the population — but not the important half. Or Lord Falconer, who pompously wafts away concerns, tweeting that "the vast majority" of new male GRC holders "are likely to be genuine". So what's a few women facing sexual assault or indecent exposure, an intimidated lesbian or two, or a class of girls unhappily undressing with a teenage boy? These “It might never happen, love" guys don't think women deserve legislation that protects us in principle. We're expected to pray that careless laws, framed for others' benefit, don't hurt us in practice. And if they do, it’s just an "isolated incident". Suck it up. And the next one. There’s no pattern. Let’s ignore the inconvenient truth that males commit 98 per cent of sex crime and 90 per cent of violence, whatever their gender identity."

"Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed, so that this week the double rapist Adam Graham was remanded in Cornton Vale women’s prison? How could a "robust" risk assessment by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) conclude he was safe?"

"Even so, would a state-run plan to bump off the old ever be acceptable? Since assisted dying was legalised in the Netherlands in 2002, the parameters have extended far beyond allowing a merciful release from terminal suffering — which most of us support — to include even young people with depression."

"In Canada assisted dying is available to almost anyone able to give informed consent if they first undergo counselling. Critics say euthanasia has been offered to the poor, disabled or just unhappy, including maimed military veterans."

"Yet this dystopian film has one uplifting lesson. The administrators of Plan 75 are young people: they process applicants, listen to their fears and life stories on helplines and finally hand out the death drugs with a benign indifference. They don’t hate the elderly, they just don't see them as truly human. Only when they happen to meet and forge the special bond between old and young do they see the horror of their work."

"The tribunal is a timely reminder to the left that democratic norms are precious. If you try to crush every political opponent or believe intimidation is fine when it happens to the "bad guys"; if you declare that law-breakers you agree with should go unpunished, while those you disagree with don't deserve legal representation, you are no better than Trump or Orban. Stating that a lesbian does not have a penis is an inalienable right."

"I will use female pronouns for some trans women. My rules are personal. I will call no male who commits a sexual or violent offence "she". But those who respect women, like Debbie Hayton, or those I meet in real life, I will respect. This will win me abuse on both sides: Stonewall would say the choice should not be mine; gender-critical ultras will cry traitor. But I reject all compelled speech. Using pronouns doesn't mean I no longer believe sex is real. I use them, in their original sense, as a courtesy. You can hold concerns about youth transition without screaming at a bereaved mother that her child was a boy."

"True, different views on the surge in female-to-male transition were reported brilliantly last week by the Timess Janice Turner, one of the strikingly few women willing, in the face of concerted abuse, publicly to examine complex social and medical changes the authorities seem disinclined to explore. That such women are frequently and correctly described as "brave", for all the world as if they were war correspondents, only underlines the extent to which conventionally abhorrent exhibitions of bullying and hate-speech have been allowed to flourish here – with some of our most trusted adults leading by example."

"The lasting legacy of the financial crisis on Britain’s electoral landscape was not to shift our political centre of gravity to the left, but to shake the faith of voters in the capacity of mainstream politics to provide solutions. "You’re all the same" is a common refrain heard on the doorstep. It was this cynicism that created fertile territory for the SNP and Ukip: both Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage have successfully positioned themselves against a remote Westminster elite."

"[W]atching Barack Obama charm his way into our hearts here in Britain has reminded me of how brilliant he is at – well, just talking to people. Whether addressing a nation on TV, getting a grilling from journalists or rolling up his sleeves and taking a Q&A in a roomful of young people, he knows how to connect in a way no other present-day politician can. Over the past days, we’ve seen him articulate the positive case for Britain remaining in the EU better than any UK politician has done. He’s answered tricky questions in a way that comes across as authentic and honest, even daring to say: "I don’t know" to some of them. He’s challenged people who have said things he disagrees with in a way that somehow makes you like him more. When one young woman in the "town hall" yesterday morning apologised for being emotional, he said crying was fine and joked he feared she was going to come up on stage and do a dance with him."

"If we were to carry on rolling back state-funded care in Britain, it would inevitably be women who’d feel obliged to give up work to care for older relatives, storing up financial problems for their own old age. Some ageing people without family members willing to care for them would simply fall through the cracks. Even those whose families could do this might find themselves physically taken care of but with their emotional health suffering as relationships break down under the strain. Duty might kick in, but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought we could reverse-engineer the evolutionary urge to make huge sacrifices for our children. That’s not to say that it’s not lovely when some opt for a more multi-generational family life. But it should be an active choice. Structuring the state in a way that forces people to embrace a Mediterranean approach is wrong. We can’t answer the question of how big we want the state to be without asking how much our families should feel obliged to do for us – and how much we care about the potential price in terms of growing social and gender inequality."

"Which brings me to the vegan burger. Take a step back and it seems bonkers that our political leaders hold firm on outlawing weed but seem loth to invoke the nanny state where it’s most needed: in avoiding catastrophic climate change. We won't succeed in this unless we persuade people to fly less and eat less meat and dairy. That’s a gargantuan task, made harder by the demotivating knowledge that your own efforts are only likely to matter if others match them. Yet the most politicians do is half-heartedly conjure up a few green taxes in the hope they’ll nudge people in the sort of right direction. But they’re not effective enough, and also hit the poorest most. Time for the nanny state to get more radical. We should start by banning altogether things that have literally no function, such as bottled water in a country where it’s actually safer to drink tap water. And take a leaf out of wartime Britain – climate change is no less existential a threat – and ration activities such as flying and eating meat. If you’re not that bothered about a rare steak, you can sell your coupons to someone who can’t live without a good ribeye and feel smug as you tuck into your environmentally friendly, fake-meat alternatives."

"I hoped that if anything I ever did went viral, it would be because I’d uttered some profound insight too good not to share. Last week put paid to that dream. A BBC Breakfast video clip of myself and Sherelle Jacobs, assistant comment editor at the Telegraph, from Thursday had garnered more than 4m online views by Saturday afternoon. As much as I’d like to think it was due to my incisive Brexit analysis, I have to concede it was as a result of me being well and truly upstaged. ... Our clip had inspired a series of jokey tweets on Sherelle’s startled facial expression as I imparted my pearls of wisdom. ... Sherelle has reacted to her fame with the grace of a professional. And she got a lot of love (“You ROCK!!!” one admirer tweeted). My takeaway? Those media courses that say it’s 95% how you present, 5% what you say are wrong. My partner in crime ensured 0% of what I said got heard."

"It was an effective, if painful, reminder of how racism manifests itself: not just in words such as "Paki" but in the self-appointed white gatekeepers who see it as their business to police celebrations of the contributions made, sometimes in the face of appalling racism, by people of colour. I've lost count of the number of times I've been called a racist simply for acknowledging the ethnicity of the medical professionals who gave their lives to keep us safe. So it’s worth reiterating why the skin colour of our fallen NHS heroes matters. It’s not just that outright racism and rising levels of Islamophobia affect the wellbeing of NHS workers willingly risking their lives to keep us all safe, it is that, as the General Medical Council has acknowledged, BAME medics face structural racism. And the government's anti-immigration rhetoric continues to legitimise discrimination at the frontline."

"Its simplicity may be alluring, but it is wrong and alienating to see all white people as potential Derek Chauvins, just as it is wrong and alienating in the context of #MeToo to see all men as potential Harvey Weinsteins. Blaming people may feel good but it won't lead to structural change. There has to be a middle ground: of asking people to take responsibility and to step up as allies without alienating them by telling them how terrible they are first. It's not fair or just that those who face racism and other forms of structural discrimination have to put so much thought into how they make the case for eliminating it. But we do need to develop better and non-combative approaches to helping people understand the nature of racism and how it manifests itself in society today."

"Gender-non-conforming behaviour is something to be celebrated, rather than the basis for teaching children that they may have been born in the wrong body, as some schools now do. There are many reasons why children and young people may experience gender dysphoria: it may be a sign that a child will go on to have a fixed trans identity in adulthood, but can also be associated with discomfort about puberty, grappling with same-sex attraction and childhood trauma. There is a coincidence with autism. Yet the NHS has ignored this in embracing gender ideology's unevidenced affirmative model and has put growing numbers of young people on the path of irreversible medical treatment that can make them infertile and has potentially significant risks for their brain and physical development, without adequately exploring the reasons for their gender dysphoria."

"[[Nicola Sturgeon|[Nicola] Sturgeon]] remains blinkered: she has ignored female victims of male violence, treated the concerns of the UN special rapporteur dismissively and failed to listen to young people who received appalling care from NHS Scotland and now regret their transition. Her implausible mantra remains that no man will abuse the system, women's rights are not affected and evidence reviewed by an English paediatrician has no relevance to Scottish children. Scottish Labour could still try to amend the bill to make clear that a GRC does not change someone’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. But the most likely outcome is that Sturgeon, a self-professed feminist and nationalist, will leave the door wide open for a Conservative government in Westminster to step in to protect Scottish women, by updating the Equality Act to clarify its sex-based protections for women apply only to those who are biologically female."

"[On the probation service in England and Wales] Just like in every other part of the criminal justice system, there is a fatal minimisation of the risk that violent men pose to women and children. Monitoring resembles box-ticking rather than a dynamic assessment of risk. Is this offender complying with his licence conditions (and even on this basic test there have been serious failures)? Is he in a new relationship? Might he come into contact with children? It takes a sophisticated professional to see through the manipulation of a narcissistic male abuser in order to accurately assess those risks."

"This is the double injustice of the criminal justice system for women. Male violence against women and children is not accorded equal priority to other forms of violence. And although sex-based differences in patterns of violence mean it is vanishingly rare that a woman will genuinely be a danger to society, female offenders are treated as though they are violent men."

"The downside for gender ideology campaigners is that their position has been subject to far more forensic examination in the courts than they previously experienced in parliament or civil society. In court, Mermaids' chair made the extraordinary claim that it doesn’t "give advice on medical stuff" despite evidence that it has lobbied the NHS to lower the age limit for medical transition and helped draft NHS service specifications. Another witness for Mermaids claimed that anyone can identify as a lesbian, whether or not they are female. In other court cases, Stonewall witnesses have effectively argued that it is transphobic to distinguish between gender identity and sex."

"I've had attempts to try and get me kicked off charitable boards. I've been doxxed [having personal information published] online by people who disagree with me on this issue. I've had my home address published online. It's just an example of how toxic and polarised this debate is."

"Women account for three-quarters of criminal convictions for watching live TV services or BBC iPlayer without a licence, and a huge chunk of all criminal convictions against women, one-third, are for non-payment of the licence. Are women really 50% more likely to engage in evasion than men, or are they getting disproportionately lumbered with convictions?"

"The one thing we do have system-wide information on, though, is the huge gender-based disparities in the conviction rate. Under pressure, the BBC last year commissioned an investigation into why the burden falls so heavily on women: it is because women are more likely to head single-parent households; more likely to be home when an inspector visits; more likely to answer the door to an inspector; and more likely to be living in poverty or in low-paid work and struggling with bills."

"Reasonably sitting around waiting for equality while empowering oneself with some silicone implants does not really seem to have worked wonders, does it ladeez? Postfeminism – as personified by the Sex and the City generation – basically confused sexual liberation with shopping: a mistaken strategy even within its own market-driven terms. So we live on a permanent diet of crumbs from the table. A woman over 50 gets to be on TV! Whoopdiwhoop! It's a victory, sure, but is that all there is? It's time to wake up and smell the skinny latte. A woman is murdered in Bristol and the response is to tell women to stay at home?! For their own safety. Though no one thinks it's a woman doing the murdering. A curfew on men would be considered a monstrous idea, even though most women live with internalised curfews anyway."

"Or take comfort from Gideon's [George Osborne] "We are all in this together"? The last election was the most regressive for women I can remember. Women appeared as trophy wives, or not at all. The consequences of that are that this government – this new way of doing politics – is hitting women and children the hardest. Women are suffering most from the cuts that men are making. Just look at the figures. This makes me very angry indeed. Which I know may increase "visible signs of ageing", but it's way too late now. Feminism has been dumbed down into politeness and party-political promises for far too long."

"The sight of the hard left coalescing around Julian Assange is indeed sore. Yet again, those most vociferous about human rights seem somehow not to see women's rights as part of the same conversation."

"They say he has made the mistake of demanding the impossible – and they are right. He has demanded the impossible. But it wasn't a mistake."

"[On Russell Brand a year later] [T]he Jesus Clown is pilloried for being a dreadful influence on young people. If the youth don't vote, then policies that continue to punish them will be waved through by our decrepit politicians. Actually, the Jesus Clown is not what I call a young person, Lydon isn't, and I am certainly not, but the Clown has a reach, that's for sure. My 13-year-old adores him, and the part of me that is for ever 13 gets why. A lot of what he says is sub-Chomskyian woo, but these frustrations with existing political structures – they exist. Somehow it is always assumed that young people are naive idealists who, when they grow up and understand how things really work or don’t work at all, will buckle down and do the right thing. The right thing here means voting Labour."

"Female oppression is innately connected to our ability to reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology, menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our bodies or voices written out of the script. The materiality of having a female body may mean rape or it may mean childbirth – but we still seek liberation from gender. In some transgender ideology, we are told the opposite: gender is material and therefore can be possessed by whoever claims it, and it is sex as a category that is a social construction. Thus, sex-based rights, protected in law, can be done away with. I know from personal experience the consequences of being deemed transphobic by an invisible committee on social media. It has meant death and rape threats for me and my children, and police involvement. I also know that the most vicious stuff takes place online and not in real life. Still, I can’t stand by. As Roman Polanski was being rewarded for his latest film at the César awards, Todd was being silenced."

"If the idea of women organising autonomously is transphobic you are walking into a cul-de-sac, which absolutely traps people in boxes that benefit the patriarchy. Because there is nothing the patriarchy fears more than women who no longer rely on male authority."

"Most people want the tiny percentage of the population who are trans to have the best lives they can. Living your best life would be one free of male violence. It is not feminists who murder trans people, although this might be the impression you would be left with if you relied solely on Twitter for your information."

"The emails then came pouring in from people who wished they could say what I had said. I wished people would stop calling me brave. Columnists are meant to be made of titanium; I felt more like papier-mâché. But the orthodoxy which demands that Mary Beard must refer to an ancient statue with a little penis as "assigned male at birth" is powerful. The no-platforming of feminist warriors like Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel is abhorrent. I like freaks. I like fluidity. I just don’t like one set of rules being replaced by another. I was hurt that so many of my 'colleagues' denounced me, but I suppose everyone needs a hobby."

"Everyone pays lip service to diversity, and the idea of a female leader, but the position of women in the party continues to be that they can be deputies, lovely assistants to the main act. Labour brought in women’s shortlists, overnight upping female representation, but how that would happen now I don't know – as they have tied themselves in ever more ridiculous knots by being unable to define what a woman is in order to appeal to their activists. They are confused about who has a cervix and whether womanhood is biological or just a feeling in someone’s head. At this stage we can surely define "woman" fairly easily: someone who can never be actual leader of the Labour Party."

"Stonewall had successfully captured every organisation and rewarded it for being "trans inclusive." What did this mean? Believing that womanhood was a feeling in a man’s head? Rewriting equality law so that people with male genitalia could now be in female prisons and rape crisis centres? Bad statistics were bandied about concerning suicide - all wrong and based on one tiny study. What has been censored on the Left is actual information, not opinions: information about puberty blockers, information about the number of sex offenders who claim to be women in prison, information about what JK Rowling actually said, information about trans athletes who have gone through male puberty, information about public attitudes. Most people are liberal and sympathetic to trans people, as we should be. When told most trans women retain male genitalia, they become more uncomfortable about females sharing intimate spaces with them."

"Before he died in 2018, a long-term user of the NHS who had motor neurone disease warned against insurance systems run by private companies. Stephen Hawking, for it was he, said the fairest way to deliver healthcare was the NHS."

"Should you wind up in a car crash, private medicine will be as useful to you as homoeopathy."

"I regularly ask these people a few questions. What is gender identity? When was it invented? At what age does it come into being? How is it different from stereotyped gender roles? How much money is to be made through surgery and lifelong hormones? What is the need for men who identify as women to make women feel uncomfortable? What happens when you want to have a child if you have been made infertile or in fact don’t have a womb? Do you just hire one? Is surrogacy the next phase of dehumanising women? I have yet to receive answers. The sheer anger of certain trans activists puts me in mind of men’s rights activists; they want what women have and that means access to us all. In response, there is still huge cowardice. The fear of being called transphobic means silence. Silence = Death, as we used to say when we were campaigning around Aids."

"When I raised the question of the competing rights between biological women and trans women in the paper I then worked for, The Guardian, my world went bonkers for a while. A trans person who worked at the paper (I never went into the office) who had already resigned earlier, resigned again and 338 staff signed an anonymous letter about transphobia in that organisation. I was not named except the person that the letter was leaked to indicated it was clearly about me. It all ended up with me choosing to leave a good job because I could no longer say what I wanted to say there. This is not a sob story. I was welcomed at the Daily Telegraph, who have honoured their promise that I would not be censored."

"At my former newspaper, there was a range of subjects that I and other mostly female journalists were not allowed to write about: what was going on at the Gender Identity Development Service clinic at the Tavistock, the scandal of Mermaids, the takeover of public institutions by Stonewall, the erasing of the word women from public language. In short, instead of having a debate about gender ideology or the attack on women’s rights that some trans activism involved, The Guardian just put its fingers in its ears and for some time refused any discussion. How did The Guardian enforce such censorship? Not by explicitly banning anything but by omission. It simply did not report on stories that ran contrary to its world view."

"The Greens have suspended senior members who were writing a Green women’s declaration which understands that women's rights are based on biological sex. The rejection of biology or indeed reality by those who want to slow down climate change is frankly barmy. But then so is the promotion of fetishistic men in wigs who only recently were in fact Tory candidates. I am talking about Melissa Poulton, Bromsgrove Green Party candidate, formerly Matthew Viner, now declaring "herself" to be a proud lesbian and a purveyor of sissy porn (don't ask). Is Ms Poulton a true trans woman? I cannot possibly say as I don't have the forensic skills necessary. But I can make the comment that what I see is a blatant opportunist."

"There is no women's space or activity, from bathrooms to prisons to rape refuges to sports, that some male-bodied people are not lobbying to enter. The reverse, I note, is not happening. Male spaces remain sacrosanct."

"All evidence shows that there is a pattern of male-style offending in transwomen. This does not mean that all trans people are predatory, but this is not a fact women can ignore."

"I am under no illusion about the Tories' own record. Austerity hit women and children the hardest. We had two more female prime ministers – a win for equality, if only one that proved women can be equally as useless as men. The problem with Labour people though is that they see themselves as anti-sexist, not to mention morally superior, and think they should be considered upstanding feminists even though they actually do nothing to advance the cause of women's rights."

"That we well understand how difficult it is to grow up in a porn-saturated world where the selfie is more valued than actual selfhood?"

"Is there anything that women can have for ourselves alone that certain men do not want to take away from us? Or get access to? Anything at all?"

"Security issues, it appears, are more important to Western countries than women’s rights. What matters is that the region is more stable and opium production is down. This, though, is another insane situation. We pay Turkey to grow poppies. Where do you think codeine and diamorphine come from? It is possible to move from illicit to legal trade and without it Afghanistan will remain cripplingly poor. The other people who see the openings here, of course, are the Chinese who have built roads into the country and want to mine the lithium there."

"Her writing is unafraid to challenge groupthink or ridicule tribes. It can often be infuriating, partly because she's so damn good at it. I have disagreed with many of her opinions over the years. Suzanne, 62, even once had the audacity to make a minor criticism of a book I'd written."

"Like my detractors, The Guardians letter-writers did not explain why Suzanne was mistaken. That poses a worrying question for democracy that neither universities nor The Guardian seem interested in discussing: who gets to decide who is no-platformed or silenced in the supposed interests of "inclusion"? Disagreement isn't tantamount to discrimination: Suzanne was clear she wanted trans people to have the right to "live the best lives they can"."

"[The Women and Equalities Select Committee 2016 report on transgender rights.] The report contains many sensible recommendations that any progressive should support. NHS waiting times for surgery are too long and should be reduced; GPs would benefit from further training; and specialist provision, which is patchy outside London and overstretched within it, could be vastly improved. Police officers should also be given training and encouragement to record hate crimes and to pursue action against perpetrators; schools should institute strong anti-bullying measures."

"[On the issues concerning the jailing of transgendered people.] The second case was that of Joanne Latham, found hanging at HMP Woodhill, also in November. Latham, then Edward, was jailed in 2001 for the attempted poisoning of a woman; he received additional life sentences for attacking another inmate in 2007, then trying to stab a fellow patient at a secure hospital in 2011. He had a history of mental illness and was so dangerous that a court ruled he could be handcuffed to two nurses even when seeing his lawyer. Latham had only recently changed her name and had not requested a transfer; a prison officer told the inquest that it was hard to tell if her plans for transition were serious, as "he went through phases". Despite this, the two cases have been smudged together as examples of the same thing – transphobic prison authorities denying someone the right to define their own gender. It’s not bigoted to ask if putting Latham in the women’s estate (which is ill-equipped for violent offenders) would have been the ideal outcome for her or for any potential cellmate. Yet that is the logical endpoint of Miller's system: prison officials would lose the discretion that they have. (In January, a trans woman who raped a 15-year-old girl was sent to a men’s prison; there was less outcry about her case. Saying that it is obviously transphobic to question housing a sex offender with a penis in a women’s prison would require serious chutzpah.)"

"This debate needs fewer rainbow sprinkles, fewer accusations of feminist bigotry, and more recognition that sometimes there are no perfect solutions."

"Transgender people face discrimination at work, casual abuse in the street and long waits for NHS care. None of those problems will be addressed by the government’s plan to change gender reassignment to a matter of simple declaration."

"The way I see it is this: everyone has a biological sex, and for most of us it’s unambiguously male or female."

"What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now it’s a question of an internal essence — a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head. In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women’s changing room?"

"But you can’t identify your way out of the gender pay gap. Biological females are a class of people who face discrimination too, and there has been little attempt during this process to listen to their concerns."

"[N]othing about that Senate circus was fair on Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford. It was pure theatre. The FBI "investigation" which followed it was a sham. It could not have been clearer that the Republicans wanted to keep the allegations unresolved, and use them as a wedge issue: hasn’t the pendulum swung too far? Where’s the evidence? It’s his word against hers! Perhaps they suspect that a proper investigation would produce evidence that would have disqualified Kavanaugh, or perhaps they believe him to be innocent, but preferred a quick confirmation to a slow exoneration. Either way, their cynicism is demoralising. The vagueness of #MeToo has helped victims come out (it’s easier to say "me too" than the more stark "I was raped" or "this man harassed me"). The phrase has helped the public discussion to stay "polite", avoiding too much talk of brutality and bodily fluids. But that vagueness is also a drawback, smudging together mere thoughtless entitlement with violence and coercion."

"It is still shocking to me that Miller could be so little versed in feminism that she could sign off a report advising a change to the Equality Act, replacing “gender reassignment” with “gender identity” as a protected characteristic, without realising the profound public policy implications of that change. At a stroke, she advised changing our concept of gender from something that is partially socially constructed – how you are treated – to entirely a matter of internal essence. She entered the realm of metaphysics, asserting that everyone has a gender identity, something which no instrument can measure. That isn’t the kind of thing you can casually toss out in paragraph 4.108 and expect everyone to nod through, unless you have no idea what you’re proposing."

"This is a tragic story, from start to finish. The imperial over-reach of a handful of trans activists, in trying to rewrite widely accepted ideas about gender by stealth, has done nothing to improve the lives of trans people. The time wasted by Stonewall and other organisations, which have spent more than a year chasing a legal change that wasn’t even a priority for those interviewed by the inquiry."

"Those two words—values and competence—are key to Starmer's plan to remake Labour. Britain's Jewish community is small—0.5 percent of the population—but the issue of anti-Semitism cut through more broadly in the general election. To many Jewish voters, the party’s failure to expel anti-Semitic conspiracists and cranks has been personally painful, even frightening. To the wider electorate, it sent out the message that Corbyn was either complicit or incompetent. Neither is an attractive proposition when choosing a prime minister."

"Another adjective often attached to Sturgeon is feminist. When the Conservative prime minister Theresa May visited Scotland in 2016, Sturgeon tweeted a photograph of the two women shaking hands, with the words "Politics aside—I hope girls everywhere look at this photograph and believe nothing should be off limits for them." The majority of Sturgeon’s cabinet is female, as is her chief of staff. She is adored by a generation of young female activists: the SNP store once sold EAT, SLEEP, NICOLA, REPEAT T-shirts."

"Sturgeon's second challenge comes from debates over the rights of transgender women—an issue that is also causing disquiet and dissent among progressives across the world, including in the United States. In 2019, she received an open letter from women in her own party who claimed they were unable to discuss their rights without being called transphobic bigots. The other side accuses her of not doing enough to crack down on all those transphobic bigots. (In January, Sturgeon posted an unscripted video on Twitter, begging young activists who "consider at this stage the SNP not to be a safe, tolerant, or welcoming place for trans people" to stick with her party.)"

"Given all the effort feminists have invested in making language more equitable, you might expect that they would welcome use of the term pregnant people. But some, including me, are concerned that it obscures the social dynamics at work in laws surrounding contraception, abortion, and maternal health. The argument for the second wave’s language changes was that women fought fires in the exact same way as men, so one word should cover both sexes. That’s a different decision from whether we should keep gendered language to reflect heavily gendered experiences."

"Perhaps a comparison will help. The same progressives who push for pregnant people have no problem saying “Black Lives Matter”—and in fact decry the right-wing rejoinder that "all lives matter." Yet, hopefully, all lives do matter—and about half of the people shot by U.S. police are white. So why insist on Black? Because the phrase is designed to highlight police racism, as well as the disproportionate killing of Black men in particular. Making the slogan more "inclusive" also makes it useless for political campaigning. Pregnant people does the same. The famous slogan commonly attributed to the second-wave activist Florynce Kennedy—"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament"—would be totally defanged if it were made gender-neutral. And if we cannot talk about, say, the Texas abortion law in the context of patriarchal control of women's bodies, then framing the feminist case against such laws becomes harder. No more "men making laws about women." Instead we get: "Some people who are in charge of policy want to restrict the rights of some other people. We oppose that because people’s rights are human rights!""

"That this play is at the Globe, the home of Shakespeare, only underscores that it is not in the Shakespearean tradition. The great English playwright is still revered today because he drove the possibilities of drama forward, creating characters with psychological depth and ambiguity. I, Joan is part of an older tradition, the medieval morality play. These pitted virtues and vices against one another for the soul of the protagonist: Greed and Sloth raged against Chastity and Patience. In I, Joan, that conflict has given way to one between Cisnormativity and Authenticity. I, Joans supporting characters exist not as people but as conduits for the moral lesson being delivered to the audience."

"[Concerning Harry & Meghan, the 2022 Netflix series about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.] Unless you have a gaping void where your soul should be, you will notice that the couple do seem to be genuinely smitten with each other. Yet—and this is where it gets tricky—they also appear to be in love with the idea of being "Harry and Meghan" (or, as they might put it, "H and M"). There's an uncomfortable Bonnie-and-Clyde, John-and-Yoko, folie-à-deux undercurrent throughout, as if taking on the Royal Family’s racism and the British press's lack of scruples has become their mission. Us against the world. That is a noble intention, but it has the side effect of centering their entire lives on two institutions that they despise. Do they really want to spend the next 40 years as small, angry planets trapped in the gravitational pull of the Windsors? And have they not heard of diminishing returns? This plotline might sustain Harry's book sales and one or two forgettable Netflix projects after that, but it ends with them delivering $150 birthday messages on Cameo by 2030."

"[I]n the Netflix documentary the historian David Olusoga makes the important point that Britain tends to celebrate its role in abolishing the slave trade, with rather less focus on its participation in the slave trade. And I recognize a knee-jerk defensiveness in many of the British reactions to Harry and Meghan, including my own. Culture wars flourish best when two things are simultaneously true, and people must choose which one to emphasize. Does the British press sometimes treat the Royal Family appallingly, and do its white-dominated institutions perpetuate racism? Yes and yes. Do Harry and Meghan love rehashing their grievances, and seem unaware that they are wealthy far beyond anything their personal talents would normally merit? Also yes and yes."

"After being raised Catholic, I became interested in New Atheism in the 2000s, because it was a countercultural phenomenon. Like pretty much everyone else, I would argue that my political beliefs are all carefully derived from first principles. But the ones that I choose to write about publicly are clearly influenced by my own self-image as an outsider and a contrarian. Being self-aware about that helps me remember that my fear of normiedom has to be kept in check, because the conventional wisdom is often right."

"When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl's work, it's always the nastiness that lingers. ... The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is "Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?" This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts."

"Dahl's novels share many of their flaws with the books of Ian Fleming, born eight years earlier and a survivor of the same vicious public-school system. The writers knew each other, from their mutual involvement in wartime espionage, and their estates pose the same problem: They are money machines, but the original works embarrass their current owners. Fleming's James Bond was a suave misogynist prone to slapping women and making disparaging remarks about "Chinamen." Today's audiences would recoil from that version of 007."

"With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn. Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida."

"The immediate consequences are obvious: a Labour government with a commanding majority but a demoralizing inbox, and an opposition that will spend the next few days asking what the hell went wrong, the next few months wondering what to do next, and the next few decades arguing over who was to blame. The only consolation for the Conservatives will be to conclude that this was not a defeat for their ideology so much as a punishment for their incompetence."

"I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened."

"The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness."

"I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life."

"If somebody could write a book for people who never read they would make a fortune."

"[From an article on Kanye West's admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.] It's hard to believe that this is all happening in the country of my childhood — a place where light antisemitism sometimes marred small Waspy towns like the one I grew up in, or circulated within certain communities, but didn’t dominate the ether. On the contrary. Crucially, there was a sense, an awareness, that Jews were an indispensable addition to American showbiz — and America was lucky to have them. The idea that celebrities, from comedy to music and sport (the NBA's Kyrie Irving recently promoted a terrifying book called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America) might weekly spew some new Goebbels-grade sentiment would have seemed dystopian."

"The America of my childhood was not a place where Jews had to brace themselves for constant invocations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where Jewish excellence in entertainment triggered public mockery laced with canards about Jewish control, as in Dave Chappelle's monologue. And, on the left, it was not a place where being pro-Israel was seen to be a position of "white supremacy" — a crime, in the new American progressive universe, deemed far worse than antisemitism."

"Anti-black racism rightly gets a lot of attention. But perhaps it's time to figure out where Jews fit into the picture because, as the Tuck report makes clear, our struggles are just as real as those facing other minorities."

"But increasingly "gender critical feminist" is simply becoming another term for members of the public who are not willing to put up with this madness."

"I'm petrified of driving, but what about flying? It’s now cheaper and more reliable than taking the train to Manchester or Newcastle."

"Everyone has the right to say or do what they like within the law, but that doesn't change my conviction – which is considered as extreme as it is obvious to me – that anti-Israel Jews are worse than antisemitic: they are traitors. If their lives were at stake, and Israel was the one place in the world they might be safe, Israel's duty would be to take them in because they are Jews. But to me, now, whatever rituals they perform, they are useless Jews. Superfluous. In the enemy camp, working against all who believe "never again"."

"Despite this near-impossible battlefield, the IDF seems to have managed to keep its ratio of civilians to combatants killed lower than almost any other army ever has. The world eats up Hamas figures for the numbers who have been killed, naturally refusing to distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilians. But according to one analysis earlier this year, even if we accept the terror group's statistics, for every Hamas combatant eliminated, approximately 1.5 civilians have been tragically killed. Given that the UN says that civilians usually make up a shocking 90 per cent of casualties in war (a 1:9 ratio), this is impressive. Unlike most, Israel drops leaflets and sends texts to people before any attacks so they can evacuate; in this war, it has sacrificed some of its objectives in order to limit civilian deaths."

"[T]he Farage approach, much like that of Boris, is not only fun for the man, it seems to be just as fun for the woman."

"If you were a geek growing up, you'll recognize how lonely it can be. If you were the female geek, you'll know it's far lonelier. By the time I reached my final years of school, I was the only girl in my chemistry class of eight students. I was the only girl in my mathematics class of about a dozen. And when I decided to study engineering at university, I found myself the only woman in a class of nine."

"The power hierarchy had white people of European descent sitting at the top. They believed themselves to be the natural winners, the inevitable heirs of great ancient civilizations. There are still many today who look at the world and imagine that the imbalances and inequalities we see are natural, that white Europeans have some innate superiority that allowed them to conquer and take the lead, and that they will have it forever. They imagine that only Europe could have been the birthplace of modern science, or that only the Europeans could have conquered the Americas."

"It was in 1680 that the English political theorist Sir Robert Filmer defended the by arguing in his ' that the state was like a family, meaning kings were effectively the fathers and their subjects, the children. The royal head of state was the ultimate earthly patriarch, ordained by God, whose authority went back to the patriarchs of biblical times. In Filmer's vision of the universe—an obviously self-serving one for an aristocrat—patriarchy was natural. It began small, in people's families, with the father having dominion over his household, and ended large, marbled through institutions of politics, law, and religion."

"De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had "dethroned" women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point."

"For the kinema must please the women or die. The vast majority of picture-goers are women and always will be. The time o day is in their favour, to steal an odd hour from me afternoon; and woman, whose work lies at home, just as glad of the opportunity to escape from home for an hour us ma, whose work lies outside, is glad of the opportunity to be in it. The price too, is a woman's price, easily found. When a man spends money, he likes to feel he is spending; when a woman spends money, she likes to feel she is not."

"But the main attraction of the kinema for women rises out of a common factor in their natures. Woman is desperately personal, and the kinema the most personal of all the arts. Through it a woman can get into close touch with the shadows she has longed to meet, can seem to know them, can follow them through the whole gamut of their moods and share with them the most intense experiences. For women and because of women the "star" system has grown up in the kinema. It is nothing more or less than a commercial means of giving women the most of what they want—personality."

"A Night at the Opera, which is, oddly enough, quite largely about a night at the opera, seems to be the best of all the Marx Brothers pictures so far. It has more movie sense if you can call any Marxian manifestation sense; than any of its predecessors; it is better cut, better presented, has better gags, and the emphasis is more evenly distributed among the brothers. Groucho, whom the microphone has always distorted unfairly, is tuned down and slowed up a little to the level of his stage performance; Harpo's zany act is better assimilated, and Chico, for whom I have always had a sneaking preference, comes out more strongly than in the earlier pictures."

"A book could be written if Harpo didn't eat it first, or Groucho and Chico tear it up page by page on the art of the Marxes. You could call it surrealism, or or dadaism, or what about that -ism that all depends on the use of staircases? You could analyse its clear cold illogic, entirely divorced from emotion. You could suggest that Harpo, with his motor horn, is in the direct line of the clowns of history. You could even argue that it represents the furthest manifestation of, pure comedy on the modern screen, and you wouldn't be far wrong."

"He has a funny voice that makes you nervous on its high notes, a funny face, no one could call handsome; he cannot, so far as I know, act, and he never appeared yet in a film that merited a moment's serious attention. And yet this frank and friendly Yankee hoofer, hat, white tie, tails, and everything, been elected to the academy of international celebrity. After the first gasp of surprise, however, at the thought of Fred Astaire in company with Pythagoras and astronomies and the alimentary canal and the origin of species, you realise that the compilers of the Encyclopaedia [Britannica] have behaved in a perfectly natural way, assuming—as it is reasonable to assume—that they are going to do their job properly for Mr. Astaire [in the next edition to be published]."

"For Mr. Astaire, along with Chaplin and Disney, is one of the only really significant trio that the cinema has yet evolved. These three are universal artists, at once masters and servants oi form which the whole world can assess and appreciate. It is possible that Chaplin his time, and Disney at the present, is the completer artist. It doesn't matter, Evaluations of this kind are little more than academic exercises, a sterile study, a conscript thesis. The important fact that Astaire, with his dancing, like Chaplin with his clowning and Disney with his drawing, has found a way of expressing an idea, a feeling, or even clean and acute perception of physical well-being, to millions of people who cannot follow his steps, understand his songs, or speak his language."

"To. come down to film criticism, which is the first reason of this article, you are faced with a difficulty which distinguishes this from almost every other form of critical writing. The film is not really a lovable art, and to criticise well you must first love deeply. Don't misunderstand me. You may enjoy the cinema. You may admire its ingenuities, and find relief and comfort in its evasions; you may even prefer it, as many of us do, to any other form of public entertainment. But I defy anyone who has had rich experience of life, who has thought deeply, or felt honestly about life and its manifestations, to draw from the cinema, in its present stage of development, anything more than a fleeting participation in pleasure. Good music, great poetry, fine architecture, pure painting, can somehow take possession of the soul and succour it. For centuries men have felt these things deeply, and written about them greatly. But until there is something of this elemental quality in the cinema—and I often doubt whether there can be any such elemental quality while it is still the cinema—we shall have no greatly written criticism of the film. The film critic, then, even if he cherishes no delusions of greatness, and aspires simply to be a good critic, doing a smaller job well; must look for his inspiration in something other than the material of the cinema. Occasionally, very occasionally, he will see a picture or an individual performance that sets his typewriter tapping out the word genius, but on the whole he must be prepared to deal creditably, and, if the gods bless him, creatively, with undistinction."

"It is one of the rarer necessities of film criticism that one has to write, occasionally, about films. This is a necessity which I find, as the years go on, my colleagues and I evade as much as possible. Those of us whose persuasion is high, write about theories the bourgeois ideology of Donald Duck, the mediumistic freedom of Messrs. Hecht and MacArthur, the upthrust of the artistic cinema in Czechos-Slovakia. The simpler of us enlarge on personalities the golden career of Mr. Clark Gable, what Alfred Hitchcock said when presented with forty canaries, and that dear little £4,000 contract that Shirley Temple pulled out of her birthday sock."

"The Lodger was the best film made in England up to the end of last year. It had power, point, and an entirely new angle, that, is to say, in' an English studio—of visual expression. Downhill carries out every promise of its predecessor without being at all a good film."

"Hitchcock gets jubilantly to work on this very raw stuff, expressing with clever conjunction of shots, with superimposition, double exposure, dissolves, the moving camera, and all his bag of technical tricks, the feelings of loneliness, bitterness, and nausea which his characters might be expected to enjoy; he even tries to give the thing symbolic weight by sending his hero to perdition down the moving staircase of a tube station and the descending shaft of a mansion flat lift. I have never seen such an interesting, production of rubbish nor a clever film which deserved quite so little praise."

"If Mr. Hitchcock would rid himself of the delusion that it is enough for an artist to give perfect expression of any subject—the feelings of a cat sitting on a garbage can, the smell of over-ripe bananas in a broken basket on a dusty street—he would become a film producer of considerable merit in the world. He has originality. He has a fine economy of detail. He has made himself independent of words with a strongly developed pictorial sense. Some day he may surprise us all, and himself among the number, by making a picture that is as good in its conception as in its execution. And when Hitchcock sets to work on real film material, real artist's material, there will not be more than half a dozen producers in the world who will be able to beat him. There are none in England now."

"[A] film-version of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue ... for all its cleverness, is not a good film."

"Hitchcock had an artificial story and an artificial society to deal with here, but his treatment of them is not that of a director who matches artificiality of substance with artificiality of form, but of a man who has in himself so little reaction to flesh-and-blood truth that he is almost incapable of knowing the living from the dead. Hitchcock's blindness to the things that people do in expression of their real emotions is not a mannerism but a fact. In his work he thinks, and cannot feel. No director in England, and very few in America, can tell a screen story as cleverly as he—can narrate so subtly and simply to the eye, without a word written, using all the tricks of the camera and all the loquacity of silent things to carry his audience from point to point in perfect understanding and ease. But he will have to learn to know men as well as he knows the camera or, not knowing men, to turn his talents from the intimate to the impersonal kinema before he can become one of the great directors of the screen."

"I have spent the afternoon arguing with my old friend Alfred Hitchcock. Because we are old friends it was a long argument. And we did not, oddly enough, argue about his new picture, which I review, with some asperity, below. I did not like Sabotage, and Hitch," who never tries to persuade the Press against their conscience, didn't attempt to suggest that I should like it. But it is a long-standing custom between us that we should meet and eat and talk after every Hitchcock first-night."

"Sabotage, the new film at the Tivoli, is the cleverest picture Alfred Hitchcock has made since the arrival of talkies. It is also, to me, the least likeable of them all. Every shot in it, every sound, every conjunction of images, is the result of close and consummate care. It is a cold, calculated, and quite masterly piece of film technics, designed to raise suspense and horror to the highest frequency. There is no department of the industry, script-writing, direction, cutting, sound, and camera, that could not learn something from this picture. I am prepared to give it every honour in the academy so long as I am never asked to sit through it again. The keynote of Sabotage is complete destruction. Not only is the main plot concerned with a conspiracy to blow up Piccadilly Circus and terrorise London, but everything that is human and innocent and ordinary in the picture seems consecrated to the needs of ruthlessness. The young schoolboy brother of the heroine, the only really sympathetic character in the piece, is smashed to pieces with a time bomb in a London omnibus. With him go a puppy, an amiable old lady, a friendly conductor, and all the most cheerful group of sentimental commonplaces that Hitchcock can gather together into one locale. Following this event, the heroine sticks her husband in the stomach with a carving knife, and a kindly old anarchist blows the corpse and himself to glory with another hand grenade, leaving the murderess free to marry the Scotland Yard detective."

"But I believe and I stick to it that there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside the code in Sabotage. As a detective fan and an Inveterate reader of thrillers I suggest that this is the sort of thing that should get a fellow blackballed from the Crime Club. Discreet directors don't kill schoolboys and dogs in omnibuses. Believe me, it isn't done.."

"It would seem that Gone With the Wind, written by a woman, concerned with a woman, and read by millions of women all over the world, is working out on form. That is to say, it is primarily a woman's picture. I say that advisedly, not to suggest that men won't like it, but because I am so sure that women will. It may not be a great, significant picture, with a strong, central theme, but I don't honestly believe that women care so much about great, significant pictures with strong, central themes. What they prefer, and what they will get in Gone With the Wind is a vivid account of personal and intimate details of this meeting and that quarrel; [life] seen not broadly, in perspective, but urgently, from day to day, as if they were living it themselves. Women are only dimly concerned with the meaning of what is happening in the world, but passionately concerned with the effect of what is happening on So-and-So. The American Civil War. the abolition of slavery, the burning of a city, the end of a social order, even the birth of a nation, would hardly in themselves justify the film's three hours and forty minutes of running-time. But in order to discover what happened to Scarlett O'Hara, to Melanie. to Rhett Butler, to the black mammy, to Scarlett's baby, during these events, most women will sit through this enormous picture without a murmur. Curiously enough, the dominant feminine interest in the picture has worked through even to the acting. The best performances are all women's."

"Les Efants du Paradis, which opens the Rialto for a new season of French films, is the crown of the French cinema, and must be an abiding delight to anyone, in any country, who feels the stir of the world of art."

"Its true concern, however, is with something much larger and more impalpable; the relationship between the crowd and the individual; the impersonal, jubilant, clamorous voice of the multitude, and the personal, agonisingly articulated dumbshow of a man. You have to go to literature, to the novels of Dickens and Dumas, to find crowd scenes so superbly and massively handled. The changing scene is packed with people; you fix your eye on an individual player, only to find him presently overwhelmed, submerged, drowned in a sea of faces. And rightly so, for that is the whole secret of Les Enfants du Paradis. The characters are initially thrown together by the crowd and eventually torn apart, like so much flotsam and jetsam."

"Les Enfants du Paradis seems to me to stand head and shoulders above every other film of the year. I recommend it ... to anyone who relishes fine performance, exact dialogue, magnificent manipulation, and an honest, if fatalistic, groping towards a philosophy. He may not get the thing completely, but he will feel the bite of it."

"I have never made any secret of my distaste for films concerned with the glorification of the spiv, and I must declare al once that Brighton Rock, the new British film at Warners, is not my notion of entertainment. Graham Greene's savage storv about a couple of race-course gangs and their fancy ways with a razor is one of the most brutal things I have seen on the screen since They Made Me a Fugitive... Once having made this point clear, I have nothing but the highest praise for the way in which the film has been done. Brighton Rock is a splendid bit of picture-making. I do not think that for direction and all-round performance it could have been excelled by the work of any other country. ... [The Boulting Brothers] have taken the audience triumphantly behind the front of Brighton in the holiday season, into an underworld as subtle as the Casbah, where sleazy-lodging houses bed shameful secrets, and a youth can become a seasoned murderer at seventeen."

"Oliver Twist (Odeon, Marble Arch) is the third of the Dickens novels to be filmed, with conscious solicitude, in this country; and while it is obviously very much better than Nicholas Nlckleby, I cannot think it as good a picture as Great Expectations. Possibly the fault lies in the choice of subject: for Oliver Twist, let us face it, is a pretty ugly story. ... And while it is one thing to read about the violent and vicious and sordid experiences that attended the progress of the poor-house boy, it is quite another to see them acted. The only essential difference between Oliver Twist and the modern gangster tale is that the former is written superlatively well."

"The Cineguild director and producer, David Lean and Ronald Neame, have spared us nothing of the brutality of Oliver Twist. All the ugliness is there: the filth and cold, humiliation and hunger; the thrashing of Oliver; the savage beating to death of Nancy; the special lust which Dickens describes in italics as "the passion for hunting something." All these things are realistically set out in the film in pictures as remorseless as a Cruikshank drawing. The producers have even added two special savageries of their own; an introduction in which Oliver's mother is seen battling through the storm in the last pangs of travail, and a climax in which the child is forced to climb to the chimney-stack and watch Bill Slkes hang himself. The introductory scene, as it happens, is magnificently done; the roof-tops sequence seems to me both distasteful and silly."

"It is an odd and somewhat ironic commentary on the entertainment of the times that the best, happiest, most intelligent and human picture of the week, I was about to say of the year, should be a murder story. But so it is: The Naked City (Gaumont and Marble Arch) is a thriller and a beauty."

"They have not only given us a first-class detective story but they have added the suggestion that this sort of thing might impinge on any one of us, unknowingly, on our way home from business; but would not in the end affect a community armoured with life and decency, private concerns, family responsibilities, mealtimes, bedtimes, train schedules and sunlight. The film has been shot almost entirely, and most magnificently shot, in the streets, homes, stores, and Government departments of New York, and I have never seen a picture that expressed more fundamentally the difference between the extraordinary person who practises crimes of violence, and the normal, blessedly ordinary person who doesn't. The Naked City is at once keen observation and grand filmmaking."

"[On the new CinemaScope process] The effect produced on the viewer is to make him feel he is sitting inside a monster pillar-box looking out through the slot at a world in the rough proportions of a dachshund. For views of processions, or wide horizontal sweeps of plain or water this does not work out badly, but it comes hard-on actors who have to 'exchange confidences from the opposite, sides of a proscenium arch."

"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom (Plaza). This so-called entertainment is directed by Michael Powell, who once made such distinguished films as A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel."

"I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture."

"A new film by Alfred Hitchcock is usually a keen enjoyment. Psycho turns out to be an exception. There follows one of the most disgusting murders in all screen history. It takes place in a bathroom and involves a great deal of swabbing of the tiles and flushings of the lavatory. It might be described with fairness as plug ugly."

"I couldn't give away the ending if I wanted to, for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn't stop to see it. Your edict may keep me out of the theatre, my dear Hitchcock, but I'm hanged if it will keep me in."

"From the imaginative point of view, the Fellini is a masterpiece of its kind. I hasten to add that it is a very dreadful kind. I should not like to send anyone to see the picture unprepared. [In] La Dolce Vita ... [s]ome of the scenes are the most sickening exhibitions of human degradation and depravity ever shown on a public screen. They are intended to he so, for Fellini is a rebel who feels bitterly about the spurious sweetness of the dolce vita. The leading character is a gossip-writer on a scandal sheet ... smelling out sensation. Wherever the scent is rankest, there he goes, with a pack, of other velping photographers at his heels. The wildest of wild orgies, a fake miracle, suicide following a father's murder of his sleeping children, the public striptease of a middle-aged woman to celebrate the annulment of her marriage, all these find our hero in attendance. Why should anybody choose see it? Because it is a work of deep imagination, signed with an artist's individual hand. The black-and-white photography is masterly. Everything Fellini's camera touches springs to urgent life. He can pour life suddenly Into an empty street, illumine some hitherto unnoticed figure and make it live and breathe. No comer of the huge screen is ever wasted. Space left blank is as deliberately significant as space filled."

"[Recalling The Mark of Zorro (1920)] Suddenly, as I watched [[w:Douglas Fairbanks|[Douglas] Fairbanks]]' harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. Why should I not turn my pleasure into profit, and earn my living by seeing films? The profession of film criticism had not yet come into being ... An extra deterrent was the fact that women had very little standing yet as journalists."

"If [[w:Sally Davies (doctor)|[Sally] Davies]] really wants to bolster rock-bottom morale among juniors, she could publicly lobby the government to address the gaps that cripple every junior doctor rota. She could argue for proper hospital rest facilities so that never again does a junior doctor kill themselves while driving home from a night shift, having fallen asleep at the wheel. She could demand a public inquiry into the recent spate of junior doctor suicides, because no one’s conditions of work should ever make them feel suicidal, least of all those who save lives for a living. She could, in short, campaign for meaningful action, not a conveniently cost-neutral name change."

"The morning after it happens, it is hard to believe the sun still shines. I am standing in the kitchen, staring out across fields of frost, when a wren darts and whirs through the hedge in front of me. Dad, in a flash, is there too. "Look, Rachel! A wren!" His heart, like mine, never failed to lift at this smallest and most jaunty of birds. But, the night before, cancer finally claimed my dad. The wrens will keep whirring, but he has gone."

"[T]he ABC acronym used in traumas all over the world today arose from a particular light aircraft crash on a Nebraska prairie in the 1970s. James Styner, the American trauma surgeon who happened to be flying the plane, was horrified by the chaos, incompetence and dithering that nearly cost his four young children their lives in a tiny rural hospital. The acronym he developed is based on the principle that when someone is critically injured, time is of the essence. Airway, Breathing and Circulation problems must be fixed in that order, before moving on to the next thing, because they are most likely to kill the patient fastest. The genius of the acronym lies in its simplicity. It gives doctors, nurses and paramedics a scaffold to cling on to amid the shock and disarray of a major disaster, providing emergency treatment one logical step at a time."

"With NHS staff being forced to witness our patients dying in corridors, in cupboards, on floors and in stranded ambulances, we can only thank our lucky stars that the country's second most powerful politician is the man who last year published Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS."

"I arrive at work to find the atmosphere mutinous. The nurses in my hospital – as in every other – are exhausted, demoralised and often close to quitting. They take on gruelling extra shifts to make ends meet. They know they could earn more in the local supermarket. I look at my colleagues’ faces – so decent, so weary – and think: what a fatuous own goal, what vindictive idiocy. Who in their right mind would take nurses to court rather than persisting with diplomacy?"

"[Frail patients] went on to Covid wards, which was where I tended to work. Sometimes, six or eight patients on a ward would die in one day. The hideous, industrial scale of death after death after death – it was utterly horrific. And I say that as someone who is very used to death and dying."

"[Clarke was] caring for patients who are destined from the moment they come into hospital to never even see a human face again [...] Every face they see is masked."

"[From a family of male doctors and female nurses, Clarke at first did not want to become a doctor] I worried that my main reason would be because I hero-worshipped my dad, wanted to make him proud. [As a journalist, Clarke] had massive impostor syndrome, always felt like I was faking it, trying to act tough."

"This week, in response to the series, NHS England linked staff to a range of support services in a tweet [which follows]. The only problem? The dedicated NHS staff mental health and wellbeing hubs to which the tweet directed staff had their funding cut in early 2023. Almost half have since closed. I suppose they were judged too costly to maintain for NHS staff who were so evidently, from the outset, expendable."

"Another memorable meeting happened in Gateshead, as I sat on a rock by a lake, interviewing a man who had a history of believing and spreading online conspiracies. Despite the freezing weather, he insisted on wearing sunglasses to protect himself from the 5G rays that he believed caused the pandemic. Having challenged him under the watchful eye of his entourage, who filmed my every move, he finished by telling me I was a good kid who shouldn’t get caught up in the genocide. Talking in real life had started to erode the barriers between us — and exposed the stark distrust he felt towards everyone. He called me a few weeks ago and, in between telling me I would be tried for war crimes, had the courtesy to ask how I was and wish me a nice day. His inability to question and see the flaws in the conspiracy theories he promotes was unnerving. But conspiracy theories are his way of making sense of what’s going on around him. It’s his way, I think, of regaining control."

"When I found that out, I was quite relieved. [...] To have someone be, like, "Oh, actually, you do receive this phenomenal level of abuse," it makes you think, "Oh yeah, OK, I’m not going mad"."

"There are huge misconceptions about the kinds of people who believe conspiracy theories. This image of people as stupid and crazy is not the case. I often find people are very switched on, hyper-curious and engaged and deeply distrustful. Often they’ve been really let down by people in authority or power and then turn to social media that starts to play on that distrust."

"[Describing the sofa she was sharing with her interviewer] I might love the cream sofa, you might hate the cream sofa, but we agree there's a cream sofa and we're sitting on it. If you don't agree there's a cream sofa, it's really hard to have a conversation."

"It's really normal to really hate me."

"Spring is an extremely energetic, personable young woman. In a screwball comedy about a newsroom, she would be the one described as a dynamo. She is screen-ready – her earrings match her necklace, which matches her trousers, which match her shoes – but seems completely without vanity, the way athletes do. All that emanates from her is drive, curiosity and focus, and the zeal of authentic public-spiritedness. In your crankiest, most contrarian mood, you would still find it impossible to dislike her; it would be like trying to dislike the Lionesses."

"The truly radical sub-text, however, is that a heroine can be politically motivated, a good dancer, attractive to the opposite sex, and fat all at the same time."

""The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," said Verbal Kint (paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire) in The Usual Suspects. This might have been true back in Kint's heyday, but nowadays it's depressingly obvious that devils do indeed exist, clad in the trappings of politics, religion or super-wealth as they sow conflict, contagion, oppression and conspiracy theories throughout the world."

"She's less one of the inner echelon of elder statesmen issuing judgement, and more your incredibly well-viewed friend who particularly loves genre movies, but also beer and cats."

"Unfortunately, we're in an era where all the guys who don't like journalists are winning the battle of convincing the general public that all journalists are one up from snakes – or actually the snakes – instead of the defenders of truth, and it really doesn't help when you have people masquerading as journalists."

"Don't take on a black kid from northern England and then make them do gang stories all the time [...] When I came back from maternity leave, my first 22 stories were all mother and baby stories."

"Trump embodies unapologetic honesty."

"Trump's leadership style also consternates my fellow millennials, who feel more comfortable with elegant underachievers than graceless bulldozers who "get the job done"."

"Leaver MPs grossly overestimate their opponents. Their centrist colleagues' masterplan for saving the Tories is little more than "suicide on autopilot" by an obsolete ruling class."

"Why haven't the ERG drilled into results from the recent local elections, which reveal Tories are haemorrhaging in “safe” areas from Essex to Somerset? The Brexiteers should use this evidence as a basis for arguing that it's no-deal or bust. Or they should do us all a favour, and defect to the Brexit Party."

"This is why with a no-deal Brexit now "illegal" we are heading for a second referendum, and the Tory Party's obliteration. The problem with brilliant men in politics is that too often their brains go to their heads."

"Indeed, if Boris Johnson does the only thing he can feasibly do and resign, the big risk is that the Conservatives will tip back into civil war."

"There is no point mincing words: Thatcherism and Reaganomics have been demolished by the very animal spirits of the free markets that, some 40 years ago, they unleashed in good faith. History has come full circle, with neoliberalism, like the mythical monster Ouroboros, devouring its own tail."

"It is time for the Leave camp to start saying the unsayable: the Tories have made such a hash of Brexit that the project is probably now unsalvageable."

"The mind boggles when it comes to Sadiq Khan. In many ways, he is a faceless phantom – a fascinatingly bland Labour apparatchik incapable of an original thought or phrase. And yet somehow he has managed to build himself into the consummate dictator-bureaucrat, London's own answer to Leonid Brezhnev or Raul Castro."

"[H]e is a genuinely disturbing political figure, spinning his own universe of deception out of London’s dystopian hellscape."

"You've got to hand it to Liz Truss. It is customary for prime ministers to spend their retirement wasting into tragic figures."

"There’s something slightly different about Truss. Perhaps because she wasn't in office long enough to go mad, there has been no period of roving in the existential wilderness."

"The conventional attitude is that, if World War Three arose, it would be by accident. But we should entertain the possibility that autocratic leaders – tortured by the prospect of death in the event of their fall from power – will be willing to pursue survival strategies that, while irrational to us, appear deeply rational to them."

"Tory Brexiteers promised that leaving the EU would allow Britain to "take back control" of its waters, and enable our fishermen to feast on a "sea of opportunity"."

"The question is why Brexit has spectacularly failed. Of course, the conventional Remainer wisdom is that it was doomed from the start. But this neglects the elephant in the room: as it turns out, Britain is terrified of freedom."

"Britain is equally terrified of free trade, lest it plunges us into a libertarian dystopia awash with cancerous meat and alcoholism. ... The new Brexit alcohol duty regime that links rates to specific alcohol strength outdoes Brussels in its convoluted paternalism."

"[[Nigel Farage|[Nigel] Farage]] has been mocked for espousing unpopular views. But an insurgent, mildly reckless party may be needed to break the stalemate. Reform may even be groping towards an innovative way of doing politics, which might be dubbed "paradoxical populism". The challenges of the day require charismatic leaders who can bank voter goodwill from populist achievements, such as bringing down immigration, in order to drive through less attractive but necessary projects, such as administering tough medicine to the economy or fixing healthcare."

"Trump looks set to prove a pivotal figure. His unimpeded energy, and wars against the legal-industrial complex offer a glimpse of a style of leadership that is willing to take on the biases and inefficiencies of the system."

"[P]erhaps Trump’s most striking "gangster" characteristic – and the one that has won him so many fans – is his bloody-minded focus. The reason we are mesmerised by the Hollywood gangster character – why we both fear him and deep down want to be him – is that he knows what he wants, and he goes out and gets it, not giving a damn about whatever or whoever stands in his way."

"Later, they were both part of the metropolitan elite, or, as we used to call them, "Londoners"."

"It's an extremely peculiar situation, if you come at it cold: neither the Labour leader, nor any of his shadow cabinet, can get through a broadcast interview without being asked who has a penis and who has a vagina. Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn't been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?"

"[In the late 1990s] But the conversations we had then were whether or not it was feminist to wear fishnets. There was never any subtext of violence against women. By the late 00s, lad-mag controversies were of a completely different nature. Danny Dyer had an agony uncle column in Zoo that he used to advise a reader to cut his ex's face to stop anyone else wanting her. Other advice was to set fire to a readers's girlfriend’s pubic hair that he didn't like. These were ghostwritten and as such can only really speak to the new mood in lad-mags, but two things had changed. One was a complete normalisation of violence against women and the other was a void where the humour used to be. The norm had been flipped: the argument in the 90s, that anything was fair game so long as it was funny, had turned into: "Anything is allowable, so long as I say it is funny.""

"[M]y experience of an all-girls' school, followed by twice as long as a trustee of a prison charity, informed a lot of my politics, including why I became a transgender ally. Before I had thought seriously about trans rights, and the immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life, I thought: "Wait, are you saying all-female spaces are kinder? Purer? Inherently less violent? More supportive? Are you joking? Are you out of your mind?""

"I’ve never thought of myself as a cultural activist, but thanks! The reason I work in different fields is mainly to make a living – professional authors in the UK now earn an average of around £10,000 a year, it’s usually impossible to live just from writing books."

"Also I don’t get bored if I have several projects on the go."

"I’m very driven, and I think you have to allow yourself, especially as a woman, to give yourself time to write, and to treat it seriously."

"But during the first lockdown, I found it really hard to write, it seemed such a self-indulgent thing to do."

"Then I met an ICU doctor during a swim at a local reservoir, and she told me the only way she was coping was by listening to audio books, and that made me start writing again."

""I don’t have all the answers to old age. In fact, I rarely think about it"."

""I have never consciously chosen to keep on working, for example, even though I’m the proud owner of a Freedom Pass (and I will never, ever vote for any political party that takes it away!)".#"

""Loneliness is the scourge of old age, which means there has never been a better time to enjoy those water-cooler moments"."

""I’m running in the last lap of life. But instead of relegating myself to deterioration, I try to regard myself as simply fraying at the edges"."

"When you have 50 per cent of women filling the top jobs, it becomes just uninteresting. Now, a few stand out – a few run companies, a few are famous. People have a go at them."

""There’s no right way of doing it. Nobody looks at blokes in boring suits and criticises them"."

"[Describing a visit to Germany to prepare a radio documentary] The country's military past and future demands collide, often awkwardly but in a way that reminds us that one "change in times" is often soon succeeded by another emergency. The museum ship in the port is named after Werner Mölders (the first pilot in aviation history to shoot down 100 enemy aircraft while supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war and against France in the Second World War). It’s a bit unclear in the presentation whether he is seen as a dashing military ace or a legacy embarrassment."

"[On Giorgia Meloni, at the time prime minister of Italy] After decades of fractious coalitions and technocratic solutions, supporters relish her dominant leadership approach and mission to “defend” the country from outside influences. Meloni has now announced the "mother of all reform packages", a power grab that would allow prime ministers to be directly elected on minority vote shares. She will first have to escape the opprobrium of opposition in parliament and win a possible referendum. Given her success in manoeuvring herself and her party from the fringes of Italy's changeable landscape to outrun other far-right contenders such as Matteo Salvini and heirs to the Berlusconi legacy, it would be unwise to underestimate her chances."

"Surely, if the Windsors were a business, analysts would say that it has a key vulnerability built on the absolute primacy of the chief executive, too small a board and too little flexibility in its model."

"My older daughter, Emily, had ME for 14 years. Thankfully she is better now and lives with me. She recently joined Kabbalah and changed her named to a more biblical name, "Miriam" – a little hard for me as she was named after my maternal grandmother, Emily, whom I adored. But I get round it by calling her "Em"."

"The Nationwide editor, Michael Bunce, asked me if there was any particular film I'd like to make for them, so I asked if they would send me to Belfast to report on the Troubles. He said he would need time to think about it. Then he rang me back: "The thing is, Esther, what would you wear?" It was such a serious dilemma, he decided I couldn't film there."

"The episode of February 28, 1988, was just a normal one in the BBC’s consumer series That's Life!. ... But deep in the centre of the programme, where we always placed our most serious items, we had a unique moment that 35 years later still has the power to move and inspire. Nicholas Winton was revealed for the first time to have rescued more than 660 children, most of them Jewish, from being murdered in the Holocaust. And three of those children learnt for the first time who had saved them, how he had done it and, sitting with him in our studio audience, turned to him and thanked him for their lives. It was the only time in my professional life when, as a presenter, the emotion stopped me. I had to break off our recording, leave my chair and take a moment to wipe my eyes. We were the only factual programme that would have told his story that way because we were the only one with a studio audience. And we were thrilled to be able to stage another surprise for Nicky one week later, when we invited him back. This time I asked members of our audience to stand if they owed their lives to him. Nicky was once again sitting in the front row, so I asked him to turn round to see the whole ground floor audience in the television theatre standing."

"I have joined Dignitas. I have in my brain thought, well, if the next scan says nothing's working I might buzz off to Zurich – but it puts my family and friends in a difficult position because they would want to go with me. And that means that the police might prosecute them. So we've got to do something. At the moment, it’s not really working, is it?"

"When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by."

"If the prevailing feeling is that Latin and Greek are for toffs, then Boris [Johnson], frankly, is not the man to dispel that notion."

"In north Staffordshire, it is perfectly acceptable, indeed polite social practice, to turn over a plate and inspect the backstamp if you are eating at a friend’s house. Because Stoke has historically had a rather stable, immobile population, memories are long and the tentacular reach of families into the pottery industry goes back generations."

"The classics and class have always been ­uncomfortably linked. In this country's education system, knowledge of the classics was traditionally the gatekeeper of privilege. If you ­acquired the classics (even as a humble stonemason's son, like Thomas Hardy) you gained a passport to the establishment. Fail (like Hardy's character Jude) and the corridors of power remained out of reach."

"The wording chills me slightly, with its suggestion of a regular consignment of Eton scholars as if by a law of nature."

"But "the classics" are so much more than this careless and aggressive chucking around of Latin and Greek tags, as if they were bread rolls at a Bullingdon club dinner."

"I love the British Museum, despite everything. I have had my eyes opened, my imagination set on fire, my intellect challenged by it too many times to mention. ... A fortnight ago, I stopped by to admire the beauty of the Parthenon sculptures, the galloping horsemen and reclining gods innocent of their role in a diplomatic feud. The museum was full of schoolchildren. The place was vibrating with the energy and excitement that comes from the encounter with glorious, awe-inspiring objects. But taking £50m from a polluter? It fills my heart with dread that the museum should take so wrong a turn."

"There is a lesson to be learned from [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]]'s comments, though, which is that rape is not well understood at all. When he says something is "not rape as most people understand it", this is because society still largely imagines rape as an unexpected attack on a woman walking down a dark alley late at night. By describing what [[Julian Assange|[Julian] Assange]] is alleged to have done as "bad sexual etiquette", Galloway demonstrates that he does not understand the legal definition of rape, or of sexual assault for that matter. Neither, he suggests, do many other people."

"Last night, an MP who I've only met a couple of times actually said to me as his opening gambit "I want to talk to the totty.""

"Have been thinking about whether or not to tweet about it, but actually that is NOT on and lobby women shouldn't have to put up with it."

"So I have passed the MP's name on to a whip. I don't betray sources. But I will betray sexists."

"Politicians often repeat the mistakes of the past – the level of turnover in parliament makes it even more likely that no one will notice."

"The message from [[Rosie Duffield|[Rosie] Duffield]]'s experience is that if you are a woman in politics, you'd better think really long and hard before you dare stick your neck out on issues you really care about – and not because people will argue with you, but because they'll threaten you."

"As I stood in a group near the bar, a Tory MP came over to introduce himself. "What are you doing here?" he asked abruptly, in what I can only assume was an attempt at small talk. "I work with the party’s host," I explained. “What are you doing here?" ... And then he said: "If you work at the Telegraph, do you know that slut who writes that Single Girl About Town column at the back of the magazine? What's her name? Bryony Gordon?" The room seemed to fall silent. "Yes," I managed to respond. "I know her very well, because that slut is me." The new minister for can-you-guess-what blushed crimson and spent the rest of the evening apologising profusely."

"These incidents are only trivial if you compare them to, say, the fact that women MPs are frequently mistaken for researchers, or that there are currently more British male MPs than there have been female ones in the entire history of parliament. And if the men who govern us aren't capable of seeing women as anything other than totty, sluts or dears then what hope do we have of them taking the issues that affect us seriously?"

"Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence."

"So I didn't say anything, and for years continued to have a perfectly professional and often productive (in story terms) working relationship with Sex Kitten Man. And he rose into cabinet, where eventually his career imploded over an entirely unrelated error of judgment. Well, I say unrelated; a man who once did something slightly stupid went on to do something much more stupid."

"But the reason I'm not naming Sex Kitten Man either is that making this about any one particular idiot risks letting all the other idiots off the hook. For the point is it could have been any idiot."

"[A]ll the wrong people are in the spotlight. We have spent too long demanding that famous faces justify what they earn, rather than asking their anonymous managers to justify what they pay. It's not enough for salaries to be transparent if the assumptions underpinning them are shrouded in mystery. For if nobody will tell you the rules of the game, then it's impossible to know if somebody somewhere is cheating."

"The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall."

"When men wonder why women won't just let them have their cosy little clubs in peace, one answer is that we fear the mentality those cosy little clubs can sometimes produce."

"It's not that we're necessarily desperate to get into your club. It's more that we learned the hard way to be suspicious of men who want to keep us out."

"[P]opulists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it."

"It was here that [[Michael Fallon|[Michael] Fallon]] lunged at me. This was not a farewell peck on the cheek, but a direct lunge at my lips. When I have previously written about this incident (referring to an unnamed MP) I have described it as a "kiss" – but a kiss suggests something romantic, consensual. This was anything but. I shrank away in horror and ran off to my office in the press gallery. I felt humiliated, ashamed. Was I even guilty that maybe I had led him on in some way by drinking with him? After years of having a drink with so many other MPs who have not acted inappropriately towards me, I now know I was not."

"[I]n the ensuing coverage the impression was being left that this was a one-off incident that could now be laughed off. I knew that by failing to act I was letting down not only my 29-year-old self, but also any other women who may have been subjected to the same behaviour since. More importantly, I would be failing to protect other women in future."

"Most of us understand, at least in theory, that marriage is not an achievement but a choice. We have learned to value ourselves apart from the value the dating market puts on us. We own our power and, in some cases, our apartments. We try not to go around saying things like "all the good ones are gone.""

"For reasons that have never been clear to me, the call centre for my insurer – a policy bought through a broker in Dubai, regulated in the Channel Islands, and falling under the umbrella of one of the biggest insurers in the US – is located in Scotland, ensuring that the man who picked up my call had to strain as hard as I did to pretend this situation was normal."

"Many years ago, I went to a party in central London thrown by a host known for curating interesting and heavyweight guest lists and, on entering, encountered David Irving, the disgraced historian and Holocaust denier. As a marker of social pariahdom, Holocaust denial is up there with – or perhaps even more potent than – a conviction for sex offences, and I turned around and walked out; not through any particular moral superiority, but because I thought "notoriety" as a criteria for inclusion on a guest list was stupid and offensive. As I left, I remember looking across the room at the host and thinking: you silly bloody bint, I'm embarrassed for you."

"I understand now why, if you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, how difficult it can feel to speak up or escape it [...] Part of the abuse is that it removes your layers of self-confidence until you are so co-dependent that you don’t think you can exist without the other person. Often the other person is telling you things like "You'll never find anyone who loves you like I do." I’ve had that said to me in that relationship."

"A few months before leaving for LA, I found myself bored one Saturday morning and decided to download a new app I'd heard about called Hinge. This time, I chose not to be so prescriptive. I made my age range wider and said I was open to dating men with children. I matched with a man whose photos weren't all that great. He described himself as a "Zennist" and had three children — three! — but he was persistent. He started messaging me every single day, which, after a small eternity of emotional f***wittage, seemed to me to be deeply weird. After a fortnight of texting, we agreed to a date. I said I'd only be free for two hours from 5-7pm. I walked into the hotel bar with zero expectation. After all, I was moving to LA. I had a whole new perspective on single life. A distractingly handsome chap sat at a table by the window. It was the first time I had ever met someone on the apps who looked better in real life than in his profile picture. We chatted easily. He asked great questions. By 7pm, I was annoyed with myself that I'd invented a dinner to go to. He kissed me on both cheeks as we said goodbye. We went on more dates. I didn't move to LA. We'll have been together seven years in March. He is now my husband."

"I grew up a somewhere. Now I am an anywhere. Sometimes that disconnect gives me a rootless feeling: an odd vertigo I can't quite nail down. There is, of course, another phrase for it: liberal metropolitan elite. Nobody who has heard the vicious punishments an Ivers government would hand out to people who drive motorbikes without silencers would describe me as liberal. And I suspect actual elites have functioning kettles."

"It is hard to be a conspiracy theorist as a political journalist. Spend enough time staring into the heart of the institutions that run this country, and talking to the people who run those institutions, and the idea that any of them would be capable of pulling off an elaborate masterplan of the type espoused by the crankier parts of the internet becomes laughable."

"I had to admit I liked him hughly. He was in an American country gentleman's three-piece suit and heavy shoes, and was by turns urbane and shady. His face seems to have been made for the cartoonist's distortion the gargoyle lips, deep furrows in the brow, the hint of five o'clock shadow that gives him such an underworld air when he's sunk in thought."

"The truth is that, although he'll be trouble, he'll also be enormous fun and H. has had so many years of Thomson greyness this vivid rascal could brine back some of the jokes. "I sacked the best editor of the News of the World," he said at one point. "He was too nasty even for me. [[w:Bernard Shrimsley|[Bernard] Shrimslev]] had to ask himself what the ordinary man wanted to read that week. Stafford Somerfield knew!""

"Princess Diana, the shy introvert unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the world's stage. Prince Charles, the public star unable to enjoy a satisfying private life, has made peace at last with his inner self. While he withdraws into his inner world, his wife withdraws into her outer world. Her panic attacks come when she is left alone and adulation-free on wet days at Balmoral; his come when his father tells him he must stop being such a wimp and behave like a future king. What they share is an increasing loss of reality. Ironically, both are alienated by the change in the other."

"If he passed her up he would find himself like a royal Roman Polanski dating thirteen-year-old girls when he was forty. The press, led by Nigel Dempster, had corralled poor Lady Diana and were howling for a happy ending. His family wanted it. The public wanted it. Like the last Prince of Wales, he liked to confide in married women, and his two favorites, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wanted it. They had met the blushing little Spencer girl and deduced she was not going to give them any trouble."

"[[Conrad Black|[Conrad] Black]]'s 1,300-page biography has had stellar reviews. Historians from Alan Brinkley to Daniel Yergin have hailed it as the best single volume on the many perplexing aspects of FDR's political life. A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as "that man"."

"Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose."

"When did Britain go out of its mind? As a transplant from London to New York, I'm often asked that question."

"The last hard patriotic triumph in most Brit's recall was Margaret Thatcher's 1982 invasion of an obscure dot in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands, to wrest it back from another country no one has time to read about, Argentina."

"Unlikely heroes and anti-heroes emerged. A viral favorite was John Bercow, the barrel-chested Speaker of the House of Commons, whose calls for "Order, Order Order" over the brawling MPs have sound-tracked the opposite of his exhortation."

"The moment the contract was signed, he was utterly different from the person who had been romancing me for five months. It became clear that nothing that he'd told me was true in terms of what the budget was going to be. And I'd never walked into that weird crepuscular den of Miramax when he was courting me. I'd always met him in a restaurant. As soon as I was sitting in that room with that horrible mangy sofa, which I now think of as the Plymouth Rock of the #MeToo movement — suddenly I'm sitting there in this dark room with Harvey [Weinstein] yelling and screaming, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is insane."

"International diplomacy rarely offers encounters with angels. But Prince Andrew's adhesive contacts with reprehensible foreign riff-raff went far beyond what was explicable or acceptable. He hosted lunches at Buckingham Palace for the insalubrious relatives of Middle Eastern tyrants, invited a Libyan gun smuggler to Princess Eugenie's wedding and Princess Beatrice's 21st birthday party, and went goose-hunting with Kazakhstan's then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazak strongman's baby-faced billionaire son-in-law bought the Yorks's white-elephant pile, Sunninghill Park, for £3 million over its £12 million asking price. This was doubly puzzling because the only enhancements to the house since the Yorks's occupation was a new zoning designation that put it under the direct flight path of Heathrow Airport."

"After making it through her Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne in June, she lived long enough to kiss off her 14th prime minister, Boris Johnson, and welcome her 15th to form Her Majesty's government. From Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. One would love to know — and never will — what the privately astringent Queen Elizabeth thought about this particular arc of political history."

"I was invited to a dinner after he had been convicted. A publicist called me in the office at The Daily Beast and she said, "Tina, I want you to come to this great dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's house, and the other guests are Charlie Rose, Woody Allen and Prince Andrew." Lloyd Grove, who was a journalist at The Beast, reminds me whenever I see him that I yelled into the phone: "What the hell is this — the Predator’s Ball?" I was outraged that she hadn't seemed to have read our pieces. I said: "I've printed pieces about this guy. No, thank you very much. I decline. I don't want to have dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's house.""

"By many measures, though, Brown's eighties world was less rule-governed than the present, and some rascals show their colors early on its schoolyard turf. In June of 1986, Brown goes to Oxford for a story on the death of a young heiress from a heroin overdose. She hires a student journalist, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, to make introductions. Mostyn-Owen fobs off Brown at a lunch with posh kids and her boyfriend, "a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson." A bit later, the Sunday Telegraph publishes, under Mostyn-Owen’s byline, a snarky account of Brown's visit, centered on the lunch. Brown finds that she's extensively misquoted—unsurprisingly, since Mostyn-Owen wasn't there. "Boris Johnson is an epic shit," Brown concludes. "I hope he ends badly.""

"I must stress, because a lot of people won't credit it, that it was revolutionary in those days for women to be seen onscreen in news programmes, and we "girl reporters" – there were just two of us – became minor celebrities. ... But we did pioneer new techniques of interviewing, including the vox-pop, where we buttonholed people in the street for their opinions (much to their alarm, at first – they thought we were trying to pick them up. Later we'd be mobbed by people avid to be on telly)."

"Benny Hill once honoured me with a sketch in which I was sent up as eager-beaver "girl reporter Linseed Cranks". Being naive – another period indicator – I was given to wonderful boo-boos such as innocently asking the wife of the Swedish ambassador if her husband had big balls. ("Give, dear! Or throw!" my hilarious colleagues shouted at me for a week.)"

"Their physical appearance [...] inspires frenzy. They look beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way."

"She cycled off to Oxford railway station with all her kit — beige full-skirted lace over taffeta dress, beige kid court shoes and gloves — in her bicycle basket [...] She was back that night, very offhand about the whole thing."

"Mysteriously police link arms to form a barrier to prevent demonstrators (demonstra tors of what?) from mounting the pavement. 'Pigs' is now the word. 'Pigs, Pigs, Fascist Pigs', while civilian arms fink to confront the unified, uniformed police challenge. The lines are long and the confrontation spectacular, but suddenly comes a moment of bewildered embarrassment. 'Peace', says the civilians shyly, 'Peace, Peace, Peace.' A policeman blushes. Perhaps because he has lost his helmet."

"[From a Derek Jacobi interview] At school, Leyton County High, he was a swot and went on to win a state scholarship to Cambridge. He told his dad that if he was still eating baked beans after five years of acting, he would be happy to become a history teacher, but by the time he was 21 he had joined Birmingham Rep, and was gainfully employed in an old NF Simpson extravaganza about a man who taught a weighing machine to sing the Alleluia Chorus."

"Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller's production, is the best shrew I have seen. She starts off in a mustard yellow dress with a mustard sharp tongue and suitably pointed features screwed up into a vexed expression. She is given to blood-curdling yells, intimidating her family, hand-cuffing her sister and chopping bits off her ginger plait when particularly aggravated. She is a pain to behold and to hear."

"I used to joke about having a "bee in my Barnet," now I am more likely to bring news about bees in Barnet."

"Rufus Norris's ambitious production is not about safety and is not for the faint-hearted. He is more interested in the darker, distressing aspects of fairytale than in cheap Christmas gags. As the story unfolds, it becomes more gruesome, involving a horrifying ogre (congratulations to Nicholas Beveney's hairy monster) and a magnificent ogress (Daniel Cerqueira) who becomes, in this version, Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law and tries to eat her own grandchildren. I suspect the younger members of the audience weren't half as troubled as I was."

"[[Rishi Sunak|[Rishi] Sunak]]'s decision to call a snap general election on July 4 is fast being vindicated as a rare example of sound strategic political thinking from the PM. Not only did it catch Reform off guard, but it has also caught Sir Keir Starmer with his socialist pants down."

"Rather than a Tory wipeout and Labour landslide, Starmer's floundering could lead us to another Theresa May 2017 situation, with himself as the emperor without clothes. Everyone laughed when Sunak first suggested a hung parliament. But the momentum building behind "no overall majority" shows the Tories are having a much better campaign than Labour."

"I did worry that last week's column, when I suggested that Rishi Sunak may be on the brink of making an extraordinary comeback, wasn't going to age particularly well. [...] Following Nigel Farage's resurgence and the Prime Minister's disastrous decision to leave the D-Day commemorations early, it’s fair to say that my column now looks about as prescient as David Icke."

"I can only hope that at some point there will be a positive change and I will get to cover that as well."

"“And there’s so much more to the region. There’s so much history, so much culture, so many people doing incredible things in different industries. It’s nice to see those aspects being showcased now, in magazines, in TV, in film, in music. To see that actually there’s a different side to the region, which has always been there. It just hasn’t really been given the platform.”"

"All done, all fled, and now we faint and tire— The Feast is over and the lamps expire! ... All dim, all pale—so lift me on the pyre— The Feast is over and the lamps expire!"

"We were taught not to show up unless we had three new trends, so I learned quickly to observe what was going on and to recognise patterns"

"As long as I can remember I have always been thinking about magic in life and how things can be transformed."

"That was defining, I think. I have always felt like a citizen of the world, with a keen sense of what unites us. Had I never moved as a child, maybe I may not have been as entrepreneurial"

"I just never wavered in my belief,” she says. At the start, she adds: “I was a journalist. I had no business experience. But I did have innate people skills.” Her 15 years at Net-A-Porter, she says, “were my MBA. Very early on I realised that nobody was approaching the opportunity to serve consumers remotely and digitally in the way we were"

"We are seeing businesses in areas where consumers have previously been ignored, such as inclusive sizing"

"I came up with the name Imaginary when I left Net-A-Porter and I needed an email address, so I thought I’d better set up an LLC, though I didn’t know what it would be"

"If you could see three disparate indications of something new, and it didn’t matter if you saw it at a dinner party or on a bus, but if you saw three things that all pointed in one direction, you had a trend."

"The consumer wanted something new, but the stores were selling something old."

"And I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be amazing, if you could combine the impulse and the marketing of what was new, and allow the consumer to just click and magically receive something on their doorstep?"

"orientale can produce a lush effect under trees—it is much too coarse for small gardens but can be splendid where something elephantine is needed. The flowers come before the leaves; rather naked-looking pink stems of blue -like flowers in early spring are followed by huge hairy leaves, handsome in the right setting."

"Concerning whether to or not, of course I do not disapproved of all watering. That would be hypocritical, since we must irrigate the nursery crops and do water parts of the garden, such as the Wood Garden, in very dry times. But my thinking on the subject is based on the assumption that water is our most precious commodity as the world population continues to explode, and modern demands for water are often in excess of actual need. Combine this with the , then surely we must be prepared to reconsider some of our gardening practices."

"s make a blaze of rose-pink, both ' and , while ’Blackthorn Apricot' is an orange-pink, , perhaps. It now looks well beside the grey-leafed ' with its spires of pea-green hiding tiny lemon-yellow flowers, or with the distinctive ' ’Euphorbioides', a plant I much admire."

"Beth Chatto, who died last year, was singularly forward-thinking and knowledgeable, and her near in have been a continual draw to enthusiasts for half a century. ’s authorised biography, Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants (Pimpernel, £30), based on diaries, notes and conversations, is a faithful, workmanlike account of a truly remarkable plantswoman and artistic gardener (as well as a very nice person) who emphasised the importance of understanding ecology in growing plants successfully, and whose naturalistic exhibits in the 1970s and 1980s were a revelation."

"The distinguished nurserywoman Beth Chatto, who has died aged 94, was one of the most influential horticulturists of the past 50 years. Well known and respected for the she started in in 1967, she was also an inspirational writer and lecturer whose great theme was the importance of providing garden plants with an environment as close as possible to their native . During the 1970s, she won 10 successive gold medals at the , where she introduced ecological ideas into , demonstrating the possibilities of natural plant groupings, while also achieving the highest aesthetic standards. In those days nurseries arranged their plants for maximum visual impact regardless of differing plant needs. Chatto’s approach was a revelation and immediately established her significance as a guide to better and more environmentally friendly gardening techniques. She stressed the importance of looking at the whole plant, foliage as well as , and judging the quality of a plant by observing it throughout the seasons."