Jews From The United Kingdom

"At the dawn I seek Thee, Refuge, Rock sublime; Set my prayer before thee in the morning, And my prayer at eventime."

"Surely a limit boundet every woe, But mine enduring anguish hath no end"

"Ours it is to bear the Sabbath in our souls."

"Obituary in The Guardian"

"He was out of tune with what a younger generation of poets were writing, and railed against the shallowness and commercialisation of the modern world, from his fastness: a farmhouse surrounded by orchards in Middleton, Suffolk."

"Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty."

"It is impossible for a poet to characterize his own work. From other people I gather that I am a gloomy poet, if not a tragic one."

"The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish; Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes Guides tangled meditations, feverish With memories of girls forsaken, hopes Of brief reunions, new discoveries, Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential."

"I was invited to Romania at least once, but was warned that I should not be free to travel where I pleased in the country, but should be more or less confined to the Writers' Union. Because I ceased long ago to be an urban poet and feel claustrophobic in literary conferences, I could not accept such an invitation."

"Translation came naturally to me because as a child I was translated from Germany to Britain."

"I suppose that I am a very serious poet – except for satirical verse, which I have also been compelled to write, though much of it may be inferior to my more serious poems – perhaps because I am not playful enough by nature, and even my satirical or polemical verse is not entertaining."

"If you play the tabloid game you get burned. I’d rather say nothing at all and let things roll. You just have to ride those things out."

"David, who recently returned to his roots when he bought a house in Hampstead — bang in the middle of the North-West London Jewish heartland — could not be more Jewish if he hung a Star Of David round his neck and spent Friday nights saying kiddush."

"I go down to Blooms for kosher food. I can go anywhere. People don’t notice you if you go about your business. It’s only if you make a big scene."

"I was checking this girl next door When her parents went out She phoned said hey boy, come on right around So I knock at the door You was standing with a bottle of red wine Ready to pour Dressed in long black Satin and Lace to the floor"

"Re-wind when the crowd say Bo' Selecta ** song Artful Dodger Feat. Craig David - Re-Rewind"

"I met this girl on Monday Took her for a drink on Tuesday We were making love by Wednesday And on Thursday and Friday and Saturday We chilled on Sunday."

"i like the way you move your body girl i must admit you're looking real fit let's chill for a little bit i know you wanna get with me girl you know i'm not free"

"In the highly improbable event of his being asked to nominate the one most un-Jewish thing he could think of, Sefton Goldberg would have been hard pressed to decide between Nature – that's to say birds, trees, flowers, and country walks – and football – that's to say beer, bikies, mud, and physical pain."

"He was as sentimental as Hitler about applause and crowds."

"In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur."

"Although I was too young to understand the theory of universal (that's to say male) guilt, I was old enough to know which sex suffered migraine and which sex caused it."

"All those words of praise they use for novels – spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?"

"I'm a Jewish Jane Austen."

"But here's something that puzzles me: is not victim-blaming counted among the worst of crimes wherever courses on faith and diversity, race and ethnicity, feminist philosophy and so on are taught. Or is victim-blaming an academic luxury not afforded to Jews? Israelis, do I mean? I understand the distinction. The separation between Israel and Jews is fundamental to anti-Zionist discourse. Anti-Semitic, I am assured repeatedly, is the last thing anti-Zionists are. But understand that the sight of Israelis who just happen to be Jews being manhandled into cars and driven away into captivity stirs memories of events that Jews hoped never to be caught up in again. One of the elderly Israeli hostages who just happens to be Jewish is a peacenik who lived in a kibbutz close to Gaza and ferried sick Gazans to hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He thought they were his friends. The experience of friends turning on you the minute a |pogrom gets under way is also burned into the minds of Jews."

"That girl is a Frankenstein, she’s going to ruin our whole firm."

"How can you close your eyes and say this has nothing to do with me? I'm not speaking about politics. Politics is a terrible thing. Everyone wants power."

"Most observers agree that Rainer won her Oscar as the result of her moving and poignant performance in just one, single scene in the picture, the famous telephone scene in which the broken-hearted Held congratulates Ziegfeld over the telephone on his upcoming marriage to Billie Burke while trying to retain her composure and her dignity. During the scene, the camera is entirely focused on Rainer, and she delivers a tour-de-force performance. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most famous scenes in movie history."

"On Christmas night, I danced with all kinds of fellows with pimples and all kinds of sores. I suddenly felt, ‘What is this being shy? I have to give myself, I just felt I didn't want to be shy, I didn't want to draw away, but give myself, I mean, not physically, but be there. It was a great lesson also for me, this tour through Africa and Italy during the war."

"The secret of a long life is to never trust a doctor."

"I'll tell you a wonderful story. Coming with all of these ideas that I had, and still have, and still feel because I never change and still believe in the same things. Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was at a lun­cheon with Robert Taylor sitting next to me, and I asked him, ‘Now, what are your ideas or what do you want to do,' and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I practically fell under the table."

"For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me."

"I was never proud of anything. I just did it like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that."

"I don’t believe in acting. I think that people in life act, but when you are on the stage, or in my case also on screen, you have to be true."

"I had a wonderful director, Sidney Franklin .... I worked from inside out. It's not for me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me do it. Hollywood was a very strange place. To me, it was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the other side, heads hanging."

"I was nobody to make a pass to. I was very thin like a boy and I was very un-sexy."

"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."

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

"[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."

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

"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"

"[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)"

"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."

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

"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."

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