Journalists From England

"The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre or Camus express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed. In some senses, the theatre of Sartre and Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus — in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms — than the Theatre of the Absurd."

"The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart — the difference between theory and experience."

"The Theatre of the Absurd … can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time.  The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war."

"The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation."

"The "poetic avant-garde" relies on fantasy and dream reality as much as the Theatre of the Absurd does; it also disregards such traditional axioms as that of the basic unity and consistency of each character or the need for a plot. Yet basically the "poetic avant-garde" represents a different mood; it is more lyrical, and far less violent and grotesque. Even more important is its different attitude toward language: the "poetic avant-garde" relies to a far greater extent on consciously "poetic" speech; it aspires to plays that are in effect poems, images composed of a rich web of verbal associations. The Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. The element of language still plays an important part in this conception, but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters. In Ionesco's The Chairs, for example, the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play does not lie in the banal words that are uttered but in the fact that they are spoken to an ever-growing number of empty chairs."

"The "Theatre of the Absurd" has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement — and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world. Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise."

"Another characteristic of the idler's work is that it looks suspiciously like play. This, again, makes the non-idler feel uncomfortable. Victims of the Protestant work ethic would like all work to be unpleasant. They feel that work is a curse, that we must suffer on this earth to earn our place in the next. The idler, on the other hand, sees no reason not to use his brain to organise a life for himself where his play is his work, and so attempt to create his own little paradise in the here and now."

"The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free"

"All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life"

"It is a common myth that idlers are incapable of working. The term “idler” is used as a pejorative by the forces of dullness and authority as they like the idea that idleness equates to evil, and they want society at large to despise the idler. The non-idler cannot understand the paradox of the working idler. He likes things to be simple: you are either working, or not working."

"When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder"

"His [Churchill's] power over the fate of Prince of Wales was absolute and direct. He sent the ship ... into mortal peril. its combination military folly, and of boyish Churchillian posturing, is striking."

"Prince of Wales and Repulse both came to be sunk by Japanese aircraft on 10 December 1941 off the coast of Malaya."

"[The] Battle of Britain did not prevent Hitler from dominating the continent for the next four years."

"We made a hurried and shamefully disorganized exit from India, at a vast cost in Indian lives, leaving behind us two dangerous frontier conflicts that remain unresolved till today."

"The Spitfire, symbol of British military heroism in the 'Good War', was always, at heart, a defensive weapon."

"In 1934, Britain owed the US $4.4bn of World War I debt (about £866m at 1934 exchange rates). Adjusted by the Retail Price Index, a typical measure of inflation, £866m would equate to £40bn now, and if adjusted by the growth of GDP, to about £225bn."

"A new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from Europe and North America. This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and now inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation. This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and – like all such codes – full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups."

"The Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power."

"The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. Despite the self-conscious militancy of some of the anti-theists against Islam, they rarely encounter organized Islam in their own countries, and are sensibly wary of challenging Islam on its own ground, and seldom debate with Muslim spokesmen (who are not interested in discussing an issue they believe to be closed). Their hostility to Islam as a ‘threat to our way of life’ is a result of their late realization that it might, if it became powerful, menace the license in sexual and other matters that their cause has won, thanks to the weakness of Christianity in its former domains."

"Let us examine the strange problem of the Atheist states, which a ruthlessly honest Godless person must surely admit as a difficulty. After all, intelligent Christians must – if they are candid – accept that faith has often led to cruel violence and intolerant persecution. They may say, as I would, that this was because humans often misunderstand or misuse the teachings of the religions they follow. This is not because they are religious, but because Man is not great. Atheists, in return, ought equally to concede that Godless regimes and movements have given birth to terrible persecutions and massacres. They do not do so, in my view, because in these cases the slaughter is not the result of a misunderstanding, or of excessive zeal."

"So sorry, Your Majesty, but I have had my first Covid vaccination for wholly selfish reasons. I did not do it for the good of others but for my own convenience. And I will have my second for the same purpose."

"I scoffed. Another religious painting. Couldn't these people think of anything else to depict? Still scoffing, I peered at the naked figures fleeing toward the pit of hell, out of my usual faintly morbid interest in the alleged terrors of damnation. But this time I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions. On the contrary, their hair and, in an odd way, the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me and the people I knew. One of them — and I have always wondered how the painter thought of it — is actually vomiting with shock and fear at the sound of the Last Trump."

"Atheists cannot bear to look their faith’s faults full in the face. They cannot even admit that their dogmatic insistence that there is no God is in fact a faith, though they cannot possibly know if they are right. Their belief, apparently, is not even a belief. And so the escape clauses come thick and fast. If atheism in practice appears at any point to have bad consequences, that is because it took on the character of religion. So this murder, that massacre, that purge just do not count. If religious people do good things with good consequences, that is because they are really atheists without knowing it."

"Fear is good for us and helps us to escape from great dangers. Those who do not feel it are in permanent peril because they cannot see the risks that lie at their feet."

"It was in the communist world that today’s socioeconomic hell — the hideous love-child of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher — was pioneered. The Soviets had the compulsory two-earner household, with its children condemned to government nurture and raised to love the Party above their parents. They had its weak parents and state-dependent adults, and its incessant divorce, all leading to an eviscerated and futile caricature of marriage, to the point where marriage was drained of all meaning and power. They just did not have the post-1990 combination that almost nobody saw coming: the endless electronic consumerism, through which we may try to buy back our lost happiness and freedom in the form of pleasure and drugged stupor. If they had managed that, the U.S.S.R. would still be there, as Mao’s China is. Marxism really is not the enemy of consumerism. When it realized it needed to care more about the mind and morality than about money, it rejuvenated itself and made the future its own again. That was what the 1960s were really about. Capitalism, understanding this, has made its peace with the revolution. Having grasped that it can flourish in the absence of freedom and Christianity, it also now understands that it has no need or wish to keep its proletarians poor. On the contrary, they need to be affluent or indebted enough to purchase its products."

"We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. Now we pay the price for that. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner. Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust."

"A very useful book is published today. Mad, obnoxious, elegantly written incoherent nonsense, it draws up the true battle lines of politics now far better than many of the attempts to summarise the slippery Third Way or the heart of Blairism. ... This absurdly over the top book ... is a joyful read for liberals. Most of it is given over to eulogies about the past that have precisely the opposite effect of the one intended. It will make any sane person whoop with glee to be alive now and not then. It will confirm every good liberal's trust in human progress. Things really are getting better and better."

"Peter Hitchens's book ... can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily Express. When Hitchens joined the paper, in 1977, it was still the voice of grumpy suburban reactionaries. Now it is edited by a founder of Spare Rib magazine and owned by a Blairite. Even the word Daily has been dropped from the title. Hitchens is the sole survivor of Fleet Street's Mary Celeste, raging against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"It is most peculiar. The very Tories who most dislike what has happened to Britain in the last half-century or so — permissiveness, etc — are the very ones who most want to preserve the independence of the nation state responsible for doing all the damage. At any rate that is the impression one gets from a new book entitled The Abolition of Britain (Quartet Books) by that redoubtable Tory nationalist, Peter Hitchens. For, after eloquently telling the tale of how successive British parliamentary governments, Tory as much as Labour. have 'abolished' old Britain, he reaches the wholly illogical conclusion that that same British democracy alone is quite capable of putting the clock back. If only it were."

"I'll be accused...of defending "Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor", as we must now call him, in French-Revolutionary style, as I think Marie Antoinette ended up being called "The Widow Capet" in the same fashion."

"To him [Hitchens] "over-use of private cars" is "crazed", rehousing of slum dwellers "deportation", defence spending cuts "pitiless" employment of women "conscription", anti-gun laws "demented", the Plowden report on education simultaneously "tragic", "nauseating" and "drivel". This is Paul Johnson without the sense of humour. ... Again, I am ready to offer a small prize (say, a copy — indeed my copy — of this book) to anyone who can explain what Hitchens means in asserting that "Abolishing the Greater London Council created the precedent for abolishing the House of Lords"; or how "our monarchy" was "robbed of much of its role by the Tory decision to elect party leaders". ... When I finished reading this book, I thought I had better have a bracing cold shower. However, it then occurred to me that the whole thing might be a sustained spoof. If so, I have to admit that, although it goes on a bit, it is very effective."

"My Friend and colleague, Peter Hitchens, is incandescent with vexation. He has received a very disparaging (and to my mind wholly unfair) review of his new book The Abolition of Britain — From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair from Gerald Kaufman MP, writing in The Daily Telegraph. Mr Kaufman's sneering view is not a surprise, given the man's liberal-left-secularist attitudes. But The Daily Telegraph is. Peter imagined that the one newspaper which would understand his evocation of the conservative and Christian values that England once espoused should be The Daily Telegraph. He knows he will get a hostile review from The Guardian and The Independent. The liberal-left establishment always give him a hard time, though they always look after their own. His book, published this week by Quartet, is a series of knowledgeable and perceptive linked essays in the tradition of George Orwell, analysing the way that this country has changed since the death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965."

"The funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 turned out to be the burial of the British Empire. The funeral of Queen Elizabeth next week will probably be the obsequies of the United Kingdom."

"When the political history of the Blair era is written, it may well be concluded that the most effective conservative opposition came not from politicians, but journalists. It often seems that the charge against New Labour is led by the Telegraph and Spectator, by Charles Moore and Boris Johnson, or from some Murdoch journalists, rather than by William Hague. So perhaps it should not comes [sic] as a complete surprise that the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works should be a polemic by a right-wing journalist, Peter Hitchens, rather than a Tory pamphlet or an MP's speech. ... On much of this agenda, Hitchens is simply out of time. ... [T]he idea of a widespread return to a belief in literal damnation, to public hostility towards homosexuals and the shaming of single mothers, seems utterly implausible."

"Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed. And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive."

"I am ceaselessly amazed, as I look at our media, political parties, schools and universities, how formerly conservative people and institutions have adapted themselves to ideas, expressions and formulations which they once rejected and confidently mocked. Almost everything that was once derided as the work of the ‘loony left’ or ‘political correctness gone mad’ is observed daily in grand, expensive private schools and is the official policy of the Conservative and Unionist party, or soon will be."

"[The Conservative party] is a machine for obtaining power. It would cheerfully guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square, if it thought that by doing so it could keep or gain office. That is why it has spent the past 20 years becoming more Blairite than New Labour."

"If they win on Thursday (EU referendum, 2016), the process of abolishing Britain will be complete. If they lose, as I hope they do and still think they will, there is a faint, slender chance that we may get our country back one day."

"Don't you dare call me optimistic. (It's a) grave insult."

"The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes. The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seems to me to be a major part of it. I do not think I would have been half so shocked by the squalor and rudeness of 1990 Moscow, if I had not come from a country where Christian forbearance was still well-established. If I had then been able to see the London of 2010, I would have been equally shocked."

"People are terrified of changing their minds. Changing your mind is a door you don’t want to open because you don’t know what’s behind it. Changing your mind means losing all your friends. Changing your mind means a complete revolution in your life. Changing your mind means publicly admitting you’ve been wrong. […] People don’t want to change their minds."

"A liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she will call the police."

"We cannot just give [our country] to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves."

"Because it calls itself the Conservative party; if it called itself the Socialist Workers' Party, I wouldn't have anything against it. It's egalitarian, it's opposed to the maintenance to the married family, which is the absolute pillar of morale and social conservatism. It's opposed to national independence, completely wedded to our membership of the supranational European Union which robs us of sovereignty. It's got much more in common with the SWP than it has with Conservatism."

"If you want to wreck the country, get some grandiose people to sit on a panel. Make sure you don’t choose anyone who disagrees with your aim. Then write a pamphlet demanding the destruction of something good, and call it a ‘report’."

"Nobody under 55 knows anything much about life. Nobody under 30 knows anything."

"I have pursued a lone heresy of wondering why NATO even survived the end of its enemies, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Do we still maintain alliances against Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans? I can find no trace of them. Perhaps, overlooked in some elegant Paris street and living off ancient funds, elderly, learned men still occupy these joyous sinecures, hoping that they will not be found out."

"Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular and the well-worn. During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism, actually a wild form of liberalism, for conservatism. They lapped up the temporary riches it provided and now find themselves yearning for leaders to take them back to a world of secure jobs and secure borders."

"Let me repeat that the absurd thing about the anti-Islam neo-conservatives is that they are invariably supporters of unrestricted migration, the means by which Islam has quite peacefully established itself as a permanent, growing major social, religious and political force in our country. If Sharia law comes to Britain, as Mr Jacubs fears, it will not be because of violent actions such as the Woolwich outrage, which I think we can safely assume were condemned and disowned by most British Muslims. It will be as the result of the entirely peaceful establishment of a sizeable Muslim population in this country."