Journalists From England

"And then he looked down at his fallen opponent, sprawled heavily on the carpet, and somehow the sight of his old neck, no longer festooned with an expensive black silk tie, but wrinkled and sagging and open at the throat, as if waiting for the final dagger thrust, filled him with pity and renewed his respect for the conservative powers of an ego that would rather kill its owner than allow him to change."

"Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny’s lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face — his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased."

"Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement."

"They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money."

"The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly."

"It was virtually impossible to think of a sentence that made a positive use of that dreadful word ‘enough’, let alone one that started raving about ‘nothing’."

"When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Now she knew why."

"More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often."

"How nauseating, thought Nicholas, a Jew being sentimental on behalf of a Negro: you lucky fellows, you’ve got plenty o’ nuthin’, whereas we’re weighted down with all this international capital and these wretched Broadway musical hits."

"Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more."

"The passage he was to read was from Revelations — or Obfuscations, as he preferred to call them. Reading it over on the train from Cambridge, he had felt a strange desire to build a time machine so that he could take the author a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason."

"What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries?"

"No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce."

"As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions."

"Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?"

"She glimpsed the pink flowers of a magnolia protesting against the black-and-white half-timbered facade of a mock-Tudor side street."

"Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of égalité could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s."

"The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience."

"It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time."

"But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy’s vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?"

"Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet."

"Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money."

"No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one."

"All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods."

"He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?"

"When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure."

"‘Look at her,’ said Patrick, ‘pacing around the cage of her Valentino dress, longing to be released into her natural habitat.’"

"Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village."

"‘Aren’t people funny? I don’t find where one sits at dinner fascinating at all,’ lied the Princess."

"He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death."

"Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them."

"It's better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same."

"There are idle students and cavillers, who have advertised Burton as the creator of a peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiæ, loosely tied, the creator, in short, of a book for a rainy day and a cosy corner."

"Stoppard's Night and Day was dedicated to his friend Paul Johnson, the historian and polemicist. Of the many funerals I have attended in 2023, Paul's was the one I'd least expected to be at. For 25 years, from the late 1970s on, I mocked him in print whenever he wrote anything that seemed to merit it—which, given his prolific and often intemperate output, was very often. He in turn accused me of "playing Job Trotter to [Christopher] Hitchens's Alfred Jingle Esq", a taunt I still cherish. When he threatened to sue unless I stopped goading him, this merely encouraged me to give him another prod. About 20 years ago, however, the fun went out of this sport—perhaps because Paul was well into his seventies, or perhaps because I'd run out of epithets to hurl. Thanks to an intercession by his saintly wife, Marigold, he turned up at a book launch I was hosting, shook me firmly by the hand and agreed an immediate ceasefire. A few years later, he descended into the abyss of Alzheimer's. "The Gospel today had Jesus enjoining us to make peace with our enemies," one of Paul’s children later wrote to me, "and I am sure that you did the right thing by putting an end to your feud with my father while you could.""

"Suffer fools gladly; they may be right."

"Many of my contemporaries have vivid memories of visits to our home in Iver. There my father presided over idyllic Sunday lunches, improvising quizzes for us children and entertaining the Worsthornes, Frasers, Howards, Stoppards, Amises, Gales and countless others with conversation and jokes that flowed and gurgled like a bubbling stream. When the talk turned to politics, he could be combative. We children didn’t like that. Aged about six, I tackled him: "Daddy, why do you go on and on about Mr Wilson?" "Why do you go on about the Daleks?" he replied. "The Daleks are important," I said. After lunch there were walks in Langley Park, culminating in the hunt for sixpences, hidden in a giant hollow tree where (he claimed) the Great Train Robbers had stashed their loot. My recollection of him taking me to London on my seventh birthday is a joy: riding in a taxi, visiting the New Statesman office as the editor's son, and then to Bertorelli’s for lunch, where he introduced me to Vicky, the great cartoonist, who was not much taller than I was. He seemed to know everyone. When I was puzzled by my part in a school play by J.B. Priestley, he suddenly said: "Let’s ring old Jack up and ask him." Next minute, I heard an aged voice with a Yorkshire accent saying: "Oh yes, Time and the Conways. Damn good play, that. What’s the problem?""

"In a novel called Left of Centre which is now, to the relief of its publisher and author alike, safely out of print, Paul Johnson wrote what is generally agreed to be the most embarrassing spanking scene ever penned. The eclipse of this otherwise unreadable novel did nothing to dim the memory of the cringemaking episode, which was continually called to mind by Johnson's public and social behaviour. This often involved drunken and boorish conduct towards women, including his wife. On a famous occasion in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street in 1973, he struck her across the face for disagreeing with him in public and, when rebuked for this by a colleague of mine, threatened to put him through a plate-glass window. At a lunch given for the Israeli ambassador to Britain in the boardroom of the old New Statesman, I watched Johnson bully and barrack Corinna Adam, then the foreign editor, as she attempted to engage Gideon Raphael in conversation. "Don't listen to her, she's a Communist", he kept bellowing, his face twisted and puce with drink. "Fascist bitch!", he finally managed, before retiring to a sofa on the other side of the room and farting his way through a fitful doze for the rest of the meal. ... Long before he made his much-advertised stagger from left to right, Johnson had come to display all the lineaments of the snob, the racist and the bigot."

"I must confess I have not as yet found a permanent replacement for Mr Johnson. His catty jokes about politicians take some matching. But I had had enough of spanking for Britain."

"Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."

"Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one."

"With Lenin he shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer crankiness he had much more in common with Hitler (…) One of his favourite books was Constipation and Our Civilization, which he constantly reread. (…) His eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India’s problems. (…) His food policy would have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi’s own ashram (…) had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. And Gandhi was expensive in human life as well as money. The events of 1920–21 indicated that though he could bring a mass-movement into existence, he could not control it. Yet he continued to play the sorcerer's apprentice, while the casualty bill mounted into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and the risks of a gigantic sectarian and racial explosion accumulated. This blindness to the law of probability in a bitterly divided subcontinent made nonsense of Gandhi’s professions that he would not take life in any circumstances."

"It was part of Rousseau's vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. 'I feel too superior to hate.' 'I love myself too much to hate anybody.' 'Never have I known the hateful passions, never did jealousy, wickedness, vengeance enter my heart … anger occasionally but I am never crafty and never bear a grudge.' In fact he frequently bore grudges and was crafty in pursuing them."

"This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched."

"Before I am denounced as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, let us pause an instant and see exactly what we mean by this "youth". Both TV channels now run weekly programmes in which popular records are played to teenagers and judged. While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! The huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store makeup, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the broken stiletto heels: here is a generation enslaved by a commercial machine. ... Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures: their existence, in such large numbers, far from being a cause for ministerial congratulation, is a fearful indictment of our education system, which in 10 years of schooling can scarcely raise them to literacy."

"But violence is an evil continuum which begins with the inflammatory verbal pursuit of class war, continues with Grunwick and the lawless use of union power, progresses to knives, clubs and acid-bombs of Lewisham and Ladywood and then—as we may well fear—rapidly accelerates into full-blooded terrorism with firearms, explosives and an utter contempt for human life. This where the Labour Party is heading. It has already embraced corporatism, which ultimately must mean the end of parliamentary democracy. But corporatism plus violence is infinitely worse. It is fascism; Left-wing fascism maybe, marxist-fascism if you like, but still fascism all the same."

"The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very, long time. Indeed 1 cannot recall anything like it ... As a rule, in a civilised country like Britain, those who hate the Israelis, or the Jews in general, are careful to mask their views behind a screen of anti-Zionism, thus in theory giving their collective condemnation a political rather than a racial rationale. Dahl is a different case. He is too reckless, or too angry, or too confident in getting away with it, to take such precautions."

"I would therefore abolish the monarchy and House of Lords, dispossess ... the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge; end the regimental system in the army ... disestablish the Church; replace the Inns of Court ... abolish the Honours List. What is more, we should take the offensive on all these fronts simultaneously: for if the apostles of social change eschew violence, they must embrace speed. Our society is a many-headed hydra: it is no use chopping off the heads singly, for while you are dealing with the second or third, the first will grow again."

"It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity."

"I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance. There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ... Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming's poison. ..."

"This kind of racial abuse is, thank God, rare in British journalism nowadays. The present case is serious, however, because Dahl is a well-known and successful author who, among other things, writes books for children and whose work is frequently used on TV. I ant not suggesting he be hauled before the Race Relations Board, a body which, I suspect, provokes rather than reduces racial antagonism, or indeed the Press Council, a tribunal which is falling in- to contempt. The most effective action the civilised community can take is for reputable writers to refuse to be associated with a journal which publishes such filth."