People From London

"Corbyn himself was imbued in antisemitic politics, and defended antisemites against Jews. Antisemitism, like other racisms, is about what you do, it's not about who you think you are. Apologists are now saying that Corbyn didn't do enough to tackle antisemitism. That gets things the wrong way round. Corbyn was the antisemitism."

"[Q:] What is the best thing about your job? [A:] Chatting. And the fact that I can write about whatever I like. [Q:] And the worst? [A:] Chatting. (I'm always behind with my work) And the fact that I can write about whatever I like - which is terrible when the cupboard is bare of ideas."

"London is where powerful people are, on the whole. The best-paid jobs are here, the best-paid egos. London is the capital of power and egos — therefore it's the capital of office affairs as well."

"In my current school the teachers seem happy and have no plans to quit. Many have taught there for 20 or 30 years and educated the parents of the current students. Indeed, teacher turnover is so low that I very nearly didn't get a job. When I started looking last spring, there were 120 vacancies for business studies and economics teachers in London; in the whole of the North East there were only three. In the highest-achieving London academies a quarter of the staff quit every year — not just because they can't afford flats but because they are wrung out by the scale of the work. This is the trade-off: this sort of system gets the best possible GCSE results, but the teachers, and sometimes the students, get burnt out achieving it."

"[T]he biggest thing, which readers may find hard to swallow given my entire career has been based on ridiculing others, is that, for my next act, I want to be useful. Yes, I know sticking pins in pompous chief executives is useful in a meta kind of way but that's not the kind of useful I have in mind."

"On returning, she got off the 214 bus outside our house, and spotted a familiar pram being pushed up the front steps. The person propelling it was a stranger — a sinister woman, tall with pointy glasses and a gash of lipstick. It would be nice to say that my earliest memory was looking up from my pram and seeing a prototype of Edna Everage. Instead, I comfort myself with the idea that I may have been the only person in history to be so unmoved by the sight of the housewife superstar — who went on to convulse the world and once rendered the then Prince Charles and Camilla helpless with mirth by simply turning up in their box at the London Palladium — that I slept through the whole thing."

"It has not been a fab day for me, I have to say...I am very disappointed because I feel like I am in an amazing place. I couldn’t feel my legs [after grimacing in the semi-final], it was a bit weird, but at the end of the day, I can still run, it’s not really a problem. I am in much better shape than that so I am very disappointed."

"[J]acking in journalism to become a teacher so late in life wasn’t brave – it was desperate. Though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was entirely burnt out – I had been at the same place for an interminably unimaginative 32 years – and was showing the classic symptoms. I was cynical about the value of what I did and of journalism as a whole – what was all this crazy chasing of ephemera really for? I also felt the columns I was writing were rubbish. The very thought of writing another one was making me feel so sick I had to find a way out and do something else entirely."

"Our blindness to ageism is particularly puzzling as it is a prejudice not against people who are different from us (other races, genders etc) but against our future selves."

"As I write, I'm interrupted by a dull thud. My partner has discovered medieval ceiling beams in the bathroom above a more recent suspended ceiling. Oops, another section of plaster must have come crashing down — but the sound is muffled as the walls are so thick. Indeed, my sister's housewarming gift of a school playground bell to summon people to dinner has been almost entirely useless — in this house you can't hear a thing."

"People in professional jobs work for three reasons: money, status and the interest of the work itself. The main reason those in their fifties become sluggish is not that their minds are going, nor that the work itself has become too monotonous. It is that neither money nor status move them as they used to and the interest of the job is not enough to keep them going on its own."

"With jobs, as with parties, it is best to leave when you are still having a good time."

"Eton made a much more profound impact on me than Cambridge, which I would say really made none, and all my attitudes and real friends were made at Eton. The friendships I made at Eton provide the entire infrastructure for my life now. It is probably true to say that of the 10 close male friends I have, certainly eight are Etonians, and I have not the slightest doubt that it will remain so until I die. I am bound to say that if I meet somebody that I have never met before, for example, if I am travelling abroad, or through work or something, and it emerges that they were at Eton, I feel an interest in them that is multiplied by at least 10. There are certain people who weren't there, and I do admit that in some strange and awful way I think, "Now, why weren't they?" and that it counts against them slightly. If we are being completely candid, I do accept that I prefer the company of Etonians to the company of people from any other school in the world."

"Parliament needs to be able to decide who comes into the country, for how long, and who needs to leave, and that does include travel bans.>br />On a country-specific basis it's much tougher, it's often more vague. But I think there are scenarios where that is viable. That doesn't mean that I agree with what Donald Trump has done, I haven't actually seen the list of countries that he’s banned people from. I'm much more focused on (...) what’s happening here."

"[I]n the United Kingdom, my party is starting the largest renewal of policy and ideas in a generation. ... If we get this right, we stand at the dawn of a new conservative century with so much opportunity and possibility. If we throw this opportunity away because of anger or self-doubt or weakness [o]ur country and all of western civilisation will be lost. And that is why we, the next generation of conservatives, must lead the world back from the precipice."

"He is catching arrows rather than stopping the archer."

"[On Robert Jenrick's defection to Reform UK] I realised he wasn't just leaving because he was unhappy, he wanted to burn the Conservative Party to the ground. That is what Reform wants, not to hold Labour to account or transform this country for the better, but to destroy our party. I am never going to let that happen."

"Well, take a look at President Trump. He's shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems, but it's the second time around when you really know how to fix them. And it starts by telling the truth."

"Reform is the party of traitors. You can’t trust them. Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning."

"The middle-class now has changed. It has become a lot more bureaucratic and we are producing more and more people from universities who are going into a bureaucratic job rather than a genuine producing job where you're adding value. And that, I think, is why the growth is reducing at the same time as we're facing increased competition from other countries that are not spending a lot of time on bureaucracy. The EU is the classing of this genre; It's all about pumping out regulation."

"How do you know what an authoritative source is when everyone is trying to make the news rather than report the news? That's the new thing it our age. A lot of media doesn't want to observe and report. It wants to influence. It wants to be on the pitch rather than reporting."

"What's decompressing, what’s that? ["Does she break for lunch?"] What's a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time. There's no time… Sometimes I will get a steak ... I'm not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food, it's what you have for breakfast. [...] I will not touch bread if it's moist."

"I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That's what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people."

"One of the reasons I don't like the term 'woke' is because I think it disguises just how bad this stuff is. This is civilization ending philosophy, where really bad ideas are being smuggled in under the guise of civil rights and so on."

"[T]hey are a flash in the pan if I have anything to do with it. We cannot have people running our country who lie and lie and lie so easily, deceive their colleagues and people around them. We need to have honest people and that is what I am doing."

"Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It's also customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here."

"I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls. A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can't see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end. Tennant is one of Labours celebrity supporters. This is an early example of what life will be like if they win."

"I would be congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think what they did was extraordinary. Israel is showing that it has moral clarity in dealing with its enemies and the enemies of the West as well. [...] Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, and I think that being able to remove the leader of Hezbollah, as they did, will create more peace in the Middle East."

"[Predators exploitation of loopholes] We see it with men exposing themselves in bathrooms. We see it with people trying to access single-sex spaces such as women's prisons when they have been convicted for violence against women, and their victims are being forced to refer to them with female pronouns. That is not right. So we have to make sure that we can sweep all that away and when we do, life will get better for transgender people."

"The law is confused because times have changed and words in law are being re-interpreted to meanings quite different from what legislators intended. Clarification is required. Not just to protect the privacy and dignity of women and girls, but also to protect those people with gender dysphoria for whom the law was set up to protect. These transpeople were going about their lives in peace, until predators started exploiting loopholes in the law by calling themselves trans with no evidence beyond their self-identification. Sex and gender, terms once used interchangeably in the law, now mean different things with significant implications. This is being exploited by all sorts of activist organisations, most notably Stonewall for their own agenda. That is why we are today pledging that, if we form a government [[w:2024 United Kingdom general election|after the [general] election]], we will clarify that sex in the law means biological sex and not new, redefined meanings of the word. The protection of women and girls' spaces is too important to allow the confusion to continue."

"[On civil servants] There's about 5-10% of them who are very, very bad. You know, should-be-in-prison bad. [...] Leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers … agitating. I had some of it in my department, usually union-led, but most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones."

"We live in a multiracial society, we're very, very comfortable with that because if were weren't we wouldn't have the prime minister, we wouldn't have the home secretary or business secretary that we have. But we have to be very careful about how we explain and express immigration policies so that people aren't getting echoes of things that are less palatable."

"[About planned changes within her party:] It's not going to happen overnight. I get lots of criticizm of 'You haven't changed anything!' You know, it's been four weeks I think, I have four and a half years to do this, maybe a bit less, but there is a plan. But you have to do things systematically and properly. I'm a systems analyst, I don't rush into things. And I think this is the biggest challenge for people: Having an engineer and a systems analyst in charge rather than a politician or a lawyer who just talks, talks, talks. I'm not somebody who starts with the rethoric."

"It wasn't until predators started exploiting the loopholes that we are having to tighten this. It is the behaviour of people who are choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people — because the definition is very loose — that we are now having to look at what we can do in order to protect women and children who are the most vulnerable in those single-sex spaces. It is not easy, the ideal situation would have been if the predators had not chosen to exploit this loophole. [Badenoch "insisted she was not saying transgender people were predators."] But there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans."

"I don't agree that we should dismiss certain art forms and we should create a hierarchy. That's what the academies in the 18th century really did. They said painting and sculpture is at the top, and embroidery and craft like decorative arts is at the bottom. And what did women have access to? Decorative arts and craft."

"[T]his is the ultimate question that I want to ask my predecessors from 100 years ago: What happened to these women artists? It's almost as though they were consciously written out of art history. I don't really know. Was it ignorance or was it purposeful?"

"New York is such an instrumental city for art, and it’s extraordinary the impact that America’s had in art history, especially in the 20th century."

"So much of the time, when I read a short, 150-word bio of a female artist, male artists are referenced in relation to them. To be honest, I got a bit sick of it. Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso's lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?"

"Women have been artists for millennia, since the cave paintings. And yet Gombrich and Janson, their first editions didn't include a single woman artist. So it's actually down to who has been able to tell the story of art history. And of course, there are so many sexist barriers that the women had to jump over. Women artists in Europe weren't even allowed to be admitted to the life drawing studio until the 1890s. The fact that they even became professional artists despite these boundaries and everything being against them is so remarkable."

"I walked into the art fair, and I suddenly realized that none of the works were by women. It just was this epiphany moment. I had just finished a B.A. in art history, and I had to ask myself—could I name 20 women artists? The answer was no. I challenged myself to write an article about female Baroque and Renaissance artists, and suddenly I was learning about Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola. I was unearthing all these stories—but they’re all there, and we shouldn’t have to hunt for them."

"[About the Guerilla Girls] Essentially, what they unveiled was the fact that museums are celebrating the history of patriarchy, as opposed to the history of art. And if we're not seeing art by a wide range of people and subjects of a wide range of people, then we’re not seeing society as a whole."

"[About The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich] It's the introductory bible to our history. And I love it because it is for everyone. The fact that he writes in such beautiful prose that anyone can understand, you want to — you have heard of a term such as the Renaissance or the Baroque, and you can look that up in Gombrich. But he doesn't include any woman artist. He only includes one in his 16th edition, which is crazy. And the fact that I loved this book growing up, I wanted to write — if he was going to leave that women, I thought I'd leave out men."

"[On Russell Brand's performances] There was a time when he hid behind the theatricality of high camp; which, as Susan Sontag teaches us, "is a solvent of morality. It neutralises moral indignation, sponsors playfulness". Posturing as a Goth Noel Coward, he was, onstage, remarkably open about his sexual conduct. But it was hard to take seriously a man who looked like the lovechild of Lenny Kravitz and Charles Hawtrey; an explosion in a wig factory. That was his cunning. He sniffed out zones of impunity and crouched within them."

"The most important political divide in the world is no longer between left and right. It is not even between liberal and authoritarian. It is between those who grasp the sheer scale and potentially revolutionary consequences – in the US and around the world – of what Donald Trump is trying to do in his second term; and those who don't."

"[A]t the outrageous height of his career, he had been rightly regarded as the greatest exponent of lacerating caricature anywhere in Europe. Gillray revolutionised the art of satire, pushing himself to such extremes of savage, unfettered inventiveness that his admirers, and even his enemies, became addicted... [H]e is now increasingly seen as one of the finest British artists of his time. Cartoonists across the world are indebted to his brilliantly visual spleen. They include British practitioners Steve Bell, Peter Brookes, Martin Rowson, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman... They recognise that Gillray's work, far from succumbing to the ephemerality of most topical cartoons, contains some of the most enduring and astonishing images from a turbulent period in European history."

"It is the intention of this book to offer as complete an insight into the works and times of James Gillray as may be consistent with the limits of one volume...and...not losing sight of the responsibility of rejecting such subjects and matters as, after consideration, seem either too ephemeral and uninteresting to deserve preservation, or too boldly coloured with the coarseness of an age which did not hesitate, in its most polished circles, to treat of subjects that modern refinement has decided to pass over in silence."

"[As of 2023] Universities and employers often subordinate this previously cherished liberty [free speech] to the claims of "offence" (necessarily subjective) and to the risk of "harms" (usually ill-defined). One egregious outcome of this cultural shift is that an alarming number of people – especially gender-critical feminists – have lost their livelihoods. In October 2021, for instance, the philosophy professor Kathleen Stock was driven to resign from the University of Sussex by a campaign of intimidation that included the letting off of flares by masked trans activists outside her family's home and the warning: "Fire Kathleen Stock. Otherwise you'll see us around." The standard riposte is that [[Maya Forstater|[Maya] Forstater]], Stock and others like them (though by no means all) have gone on to other forms of gainful employment and prominence in public life. How, then, could they possibly have been "censored"? This is an absurd and infantile argument. The fact that these two women have been sufficiently resourceful and resilient to find new ways of making their ideas known and their voices heard is neither here nor there. Stock should never have been menaced to the point that it was intolerable for her to remain a faculty member; Forstater should not have lost her job."

"Gillray was morose and angry, a sort of savagely perverted moralist, to whom mankind was hateful."

"Certainly, the private life of James Gillray was disastrous; yet so clear-sighted was he, so ruthless in his regard for truth as he saw it (even in himself), that his drawings have a bitter verity almost unknown elsewhere in British art: a cruel rigour that makes him seem, in spirit, closer to the satirists of the Continent, where his art was, in fact, much admired. However remote the politics of Gillray's day may seem, to look at his caricatures is to be caught up, almost in spit of oneself, in the frenzies of this patriotic radical."

"It was, indeed, Gillray who excelled all others, at this period, in the production of this sort of thing. Savage in temperament, and at times extremely coarse, he had extraordinary vigour."