Novelists From England

"People are going to be sent to prison for saying somebody's common soon, aren't they? Really. You can’t say anybody’s fat, you can’t say anybody’s anything, now. Not that one wants to say people are fat, but mind you, they are huge, aren’t they. Enormous. Enormous [...] I hate people being hurt. But nobody can say anything now. Anyway, enough of that [...] And all this [anti] wolf-whistling. I love being wolf-whistled at. I’m that generation. All contributions gratefully received."

"The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things."

"There were 600,000 dead, 14,000,000 driven from their homes 100,000 young girls kidnapped by both sides, forcibly converted or sold on the auction block ... One convoy of Sikhs and Hindus from West Punjab was 74 miles long, and raiders (Muslim mobs) who attack it constantly en route did not need to watch for it: they could smell its coming, for it was riddled with cholera and other foul diseases ... there took place murder, looting, burning and raping such as the world had not seen since the days of Chengiz Khan."

"I don't think I'm going to be a pessimist when I grow up." He chuckled. "I never thought I was going to be one either, when I was your age."

"Self-loathing was a difficult thing for those who had none of their own to understand. It had its own seasons. It could trick you into thinking it had lifted, only to come cycling around again. You attacked yourself in the same ways you always had. You flung the same accusations. Perhaps you could no more rid yourself of self-loathing than you could rid the world of winter. What was certain was that, like winter, in its wake it left you bare."

"Things die," said Leonard. "Deal with it."

"She had lost faith in him so gradually that at first he'd hardly even noticed."

"Anything you do a lot of, you get good at."

"He said, "What's the point of being alive if all you do is look at a screen?"

"They're , . . my friends." You said you hated having friends. You said all they did was waste your free time, and cost you money at Christmas."

"I don't think I could ever be an actual parent," she said. "I'd just be too scared of fucking it up." "Me too. I'm definitely never having any kids."

""How did you get to be so fearless?" Adrien asked Hiroko. "I mean, I wish I could deal with all this as naturally as you." "My friend Carter used to say that the world keeps no secrets. Look it in the eye if you can. Everything is there to see." "Is that supposed to make it easier?" "You can look away if you want. Lots of people do. You can make up a whole pretend world to look at instead." Adrien hung his head. He supposed that was precisely his own method, although he wasn't sure that his pretend world was any less frightening than the real one. If there was one thing Adrien Thomas had always known about himself, it was his limitations. It was not, deep down, woodcraft that he had truly sought to learn here. It was how to be a man who wasn't weak, and who was sure of his place in the world."

"Adrien had always considered cider a crude drink, flavoured like a highway underpass. The cider was bitter and salty both, like sea air cheering the senses just as it stung them. He had a lot of thinking to do, and thinking was always less daunting with a glass in hand."

"The rain watered the world so heavily that he wondered if it might rinse it away. He did not think he would mind if it did."

"What good is being in love with a person, if it only binds you to a thousand quiet disappointments, and new problems for every one that you fix?"

"She folded her arms, suddenly feeling like she used to at school: the stupid one who answered questions wrong. That was the reason why she didn't do much talking. Talking was deceit, one of the games people played to keep themselves from looking the world in the eye."

"Work out what you really want from life."

""There's no shame in giving up," said Adrien. "I give up on all sorts of things." He whipped out his hip flask and offered it to her. She drank more than he felt he had been offering."

"Little things overwhelm you. Sometimes it's as if everything overwhelms you." "You're right," he'd said, wiping tears and rainwater alike from his cheeks. "But in those times the world just seems so damned formidable." "I want to help you, Adrien. But you mustn't give up. You can't wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it."

""We're vegetarians," explained Hannah, "did I mention that before?" "Er . . . no," said Adrien, a carnivore's disappointment writ large across his face."

"Look at you. Your folded arms. Your smug sneer. How do men like you get put in charge of the world, when you don't know the first thing about it?"

"How he hated gardening. "Mother Nature is a psychopath," he'd told Michelle, "and I won't spend my weekends on my hands and knees, painting her toenails.""

"Listen, have you ever had one of those nights when you guess how many healthy years you've got left and think, Oh shit, that's not enough?"

"She worried about [her son, Seb] often, especially when rising waters were mentioned on the news, or the death of a species announced, or noises made about ice caps slipping into oceans. She thought of Seb leaning over his laptop, and what kind of world he was growing himself up in. And when the news brought tales of louder disasters, and to her shame Hannah found them easy to forget in her day-to-day rush, she feared a flood or a tidal wave of heart-stopping magnitude sweeping through the landscapes of Seb's future, and him having simply no idea of how to cope."

"Wander into any pub in the city and strike up a conversation. Offer to buy your companion a drink, order a Guinness and take it from there."

"War is hell, and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time."

"What do you mean, funny? Funny-peculiar or funny ha-ha?"

"This was a world in which only the ignorant could be happy."

"Ignorance breeds fear. Tell people the truth. Trust them to keep their heads."

"War meant a perpetual postponement of life, yet one did not cease to grow old."

"'She’s just a typical bourgeois reactionary.’ ‘You mean, her prejudices are different from yours.'"

"An age of chivalry as outmoded as honour, as obsolete as truth."

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

"The Regency period is peculiarly Miss Heyer's own, and The Grand Sophy is one of her very best. No one is more adept at combining the amusing idiom of the time with an undated wit to make dialogue that crackles with life. No one creates characters so entirely without anachronisms yet so convincingly flesh and blood. There is nothing of the egad-forsooth style in her books, but the very essence of the swaggering, coaching, gaming set is on every page. If there is any justice in the writing world, which is sometimes questionable, Miss Heyer's public will continue to increase substantially."

"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."

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

"I like very few people nowadays; in fact, the number of persons whom I cordially dislike increases almost hourly."

"I daresay Freddy might not be a great hand at slaying dragons—but one has not the smallest need of a man who can kill dragons!"

"As soon as one promises not to do something, it becomes the one thing above all others that one most wishes to do."

"I don’t think I am green. It’s true I only know what I’ve read in books, but I’ve read a great many books."

"The organ pealed forth, though never except in fiction does it do this, rather blaring and bursting, or in more refined cases quavering. In every heart began to spring that exquisite hope, seldom if ever realised, that the bride will have had a fit, or eloped with someone else."

"Doris Phipps and Lily-Annie Pollett, though they looked incredibly plain and depraved in oyster satin blouses, tight-seated, bell-bottomed trousers, red nails on dirty hands, greasy curls hanging on their shoulders, a cigarette for ever glued to their lips, were really very nice, kind girls."

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

"Honesty. I think all religions involve an element of self-delusion, and that’s no way to live your life. And freedom: the great thing about living in a secular society is that people have the ability to pursue their own religious or non-religious beliefs in their own ways, but not to compel others to follow them."

"[Review of Walter's book The New Feminism.] In its bid for sophisticated political adulthood, the new feminism also risks throwing out the most important legacy of women’s politics: the inquiry into personal life. Walter argues that these questions are now 'sorted', that women no longer need to justify themselves in terms of their private behaviour. And it may well be that what to wear and who to sleep with are, as Walter points out, rather passé as political issues, but that's not the end of the story. In my view, the matter of domestic democracy will become the site of renewed private/public struggles, partly because the question of who does what in the home is crucial to the question of who does what outside the home. Another factor to be considered is the growing number of women now employed by the professional classes to do their cleaning, childcare and ironing, often at wages well below any generally agreed national minimum. The old servant problem could come back to haunt the new middle class, itself caught in an ever-intensifying time crisis. Walter is optimistic about men in general – there is none of the male-baiting exhibited by the pop culture girls like Suzanne Moore or Julie Burchill – and particularly about their place in the home. Men, she believes, are ready and willing to take part in the 'unique poignancy' of domestic life. I would say that Walter was right to outlaw prescription in personal politics – there was something truly depressing about diktat feminism at its height – but description will surely remain the foundation of the most intelligent feminist writing."

"It’s vital to speak up for humanism and rationalism in a world in which more and more people are falling into misinformation and prejudice. Obviously we can’t dismiss the positive role that religion plays in many people’s lives, but I am concerned that so often people are just picking up on lazy prejudices rather than trying to build consensus around ways forward. Humanism has a role to play in helping to ground debates in truth and pragmatism."

"We did win some battles at Women for Refugee Women – we helped to end the immigration detention of children, and we won a time limit on the detention of pregnant women, for instance. But overall it’s horrible to see how governments have used migrants and refugees as a scapegoat for wider failures in society. It’s very hard right now to build empathy around what women who cross borders are going through. But change is urgently needed – we really need to build a transparent asylum process in which women who seek safety here can get a fair hearing. Right now one of the key issues for refugee women – and for many other people – is also the lack of decent affordable housing, so that even if they do get their refugee status women and children are so often struggling with homelessness or insecure housing. So this links into wider issues around getting our society working for everyone. I truly wish we could see more leadership from the current Labour government on fairness in society, as well as empathy towards those who cross borders."

"The trend in feminism over the past few years - spearheaded by Natasha Walter's New Feminism - has been to say that equal pay, equal opportunities and good childcare are all that matter; relationships, sexuality and appearance are no longer feminist issues. The result of this re-definition of feminism is that many more people can call themselves feminists - you'd have to be a pretty hoary old misogynist to believe that women don't deserve equal pay. And so, the eighties refrain of 'I'm not a feminist, but...' has been replaced with 'I'm a feminist if feminism means equal pay, but...' To be followed with something like '...not if it means I can't shave my legs.'"

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