Non Fiction Authors From England

"Mr. Jorrocks then called upon the company in succession for a toast, a song, or a sentiment. Nimrod gave, "The Royal Staghounds"; Crane gave, "Champagne to our real friends, and real pain to our sham friends.""

"Gerald had the sharpest tongue of any Labour politician. Though not a dislikeable man, he enjoyed being disliked. He was a politician through and through, but in the old style. Not for him the pink-cheeked hypocrisy of New Labour. He had learned his trade in the bowels of the old Labour Party and practised it in the service of Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. He was a cynic who loved intrigue, but deep down there was a sentimental core. He wrote the funniest book available on the art of being a minister."

"It's time for our government to make clear to the Israeli government that its conduct and policies are unacceptable and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest, which is the Israelis' real goal, but which is impossible for them to achieve. They're not simply war criminals; they're fools."

"Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed."

"My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszów. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. Madam Deputy Speaker, my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli Army Major Livovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, eight hundred Palestinians. The total is now a thousand. She replied instantly, "Five hundred of them were militants." That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."

"It is time to remind [[Ariel Sharon|[Ariel] Sharon]] that the star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive Government. His actions are staining the star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and [[Jacob Epstein|[Jacob] Epstein]], Mendelssohn and Mahler, Sergei Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps and now involved in killing Palestinians once again."

"It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists."

"Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated – unfairly so, in my opinion."

"Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots"

"Those who would retain his services should confine him to subjects better suited…to his sniggering, puerile, defamatory and cruelly limited talents."

"The bedraggled warhorse of American blowhardism."

"[The] swarming, grunting masses of jackals..."

"A jumped-up little twerp [and a] prime candidate for exorcism"

"An overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people."

"All those pent-up forces of envy and disbelief finally showed their true colours instead of masquerading in the deceitful fashion they have used since I took over at Argus... there is something about the Canadian mentality that cannot stand an unbroken string of successes, unless it comes after a long life or after evident ordeal. No one begrudged Terry Fox getting the Order of Canada and no one boos any more when E.P. Taylor wins the Queen's Plate. But present Canadians with too much success too soon and it's just unbearable. That's how it works in this country."

"Bud (McDougald) was a true Darwinist, so in his view, when he died--to the winner should go the spoils. It was a free-for-all. A lot of people, Nelson Davis for one, used to ask me what Bud would have thought of the somewhat unseemly scramble that went on after he died. I suspect it would have flattered him. Had he wanted an orderly succession, he would have organized one. He certainly told Monte and me that he wanted us to take over--but he told a few other people the same thing. Bud was very skillful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn't within anyone's grasp."

"The present government of Quebec is the most financially and intellectually corrupt in the history of the province. There are the shady deals, brazenly conducted, and the broken promises, most conspicuously that of last October to retain Bill 63... The government dragged out the ancient and totally fictitious spectre of assimilation to justify Bill 22 and its rejection of the right of free choice in education, its its reduction of English education to the lowest echelon of ministerial whim, its assault upon freedom of expression through the regulation of the internal and external language of businesses and other organizations, and its creation of a fatuous new linguistic bureaucracy that will conduct a system of organized denunciation, harassment, and patronage... There is a paralytic social sickness in Quebec. In all this debate, not a single French Quebecker has objected to Bill 22 on the grounds that it was undemocratic or a reduction of liberties exercised in the province. The Quebec Civil Liberties Union, founded by Pierre Trudeau, from which one might have expected such sentiments, has instead demanded the abolition of English education, and this through the spokemanship of Jean-Louis Roy, who derives his income from McGill University.... It is clear that Mr. Bourassa... is now going to try to eliminate the Parti Quebecois by a policy of gradual scapegoatism directed against the non-French elements in the province... The English community here, still deluding itself with the illusion of Montreal as an incomparably fine place to live, is leaderless and irrelevant, except as the hostage of a dishonest government. Last month one of the most moderate ministers, Guy St-Pierre, told an English businessman's group, 'If you don't like Quebec, you can leave it.' With sadness but with certitude, I accept that choice."

"Having read all the other works on the same subject, including M. Rumilly's recently published effort; having spent innumerable days and evenings in the dusty and poorly-illuminated archival chaos of Maurice Duplessis's basement, and having conscientiously revised the original version of this thesis in conformity with many objections, some of which were uninformed and unjust, I am unpretentiously conscious of presenting herewith the definitive work in its field, in any language."

"Perhaps Archbishop Paul-Émile Léger suffered from what they call in French a taste for the sensational. He was like one of those matadors who, as the cadence of the oles gets more and more rapid, are always trying to find something more daring to do. He grew hasty in his desire to produce new spectacles and maybe did a few ill-considered things. But on the whole I remain impressed with him."

"Black condemned the 1966 decision made by Harold Wilson to pull out of the Persian Gulf and scrap the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers. He regarded the resignation of Christopher Mayhew, Minister of Defence for the Navy as "the last resonance of good sense in that country until Maggie Thatcher came in.""

"I had never heard of [Walter] Young before, and I do not expect to hear from him again."

"I tended, even from my early years, to look at the world from a slightly different vantage point. Although I might have had trouble articulating it at the age of 10, I wasn't unduly convinced of the durability of the Anglo-Saxon world as we had come to know it in the postwar period, a world of latter-day materialism advancing around the globe on the wongs of the English language and the American dollar. I had a sneaking suspicion that we were living in a bit of a fool's paradise..."

"Since biblical times, and probably before, the wealthy have been envied and condemned."

"We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight."

"All concerned deny any wrongdoing."

"Full of flaws, unbelievably arrogant, a man who did flirt with the far right, but, over the course of the last ten years, the boy from Chernobyl stood up for the idea of another Russia, a country not defined by grotesque corruption, cruelty and a stupid war, but by honesty, courage and great good humour. That secures his place in history. When all hope was lost, and Russia turned, yet again, back to darkness, then along came a knight in dented armour, tilting at evil windmills. Alexei Navalny was bold and good. Alexei Navalny kept the red eye of Russia's soul alive and one day it will start blink-blink-blinking again as it stomps, like Terminator 2, towards the machinery of greed that controls the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny is dead, but what he stood for will be back."

"Dictators fuck things up, big time. They destroy the chance of peaceful political change so that when, eventually, they die in their sleep or blow their brains out or are stabbed repeatedly in the anus – the respective ends of Stalin, Hitler, Gaddafi – chaos reigns. At best, for him, old age will come to Vladimir Putin and then the only end of age and the Russia he created will fall apart. At worst, Alexei Navalny's prediction after the fireball that did for Evgeny Prigozhin that creating, then destroying, armed gangs is a recipe for civil war will come true sooner than Putin thinks. And then, perhaps, Russia will descend into Mad Max with snow on its boots, cast out of the pale by the Western world, hated by the Islamists in its south and east, its Siberian riches eyed by the Chinese dragon."

"The Make America Great Again wing of the US Republican Party has been highly critical of Ukrainian attempts to police the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, not perhaps realising that its head, Patriarch Kirill, was an active KGB agent in Soviet times, has been mired in a cigarette smuggling scandal and is reckoned to be worth $4 billion. For the avoidance of doubt, Kirill has called Putin's presidency 'a miracle of God'. Praise be, some say."

"One simple yardstick of someone's life, of the good or bad they have done, is how many people turn up for their funeral. In Navalny's case, there was an extra dimension knowing that the likely consequences of turning up to say a last goodbye could include getting sacked, arrested, a clubbing by the police or worse."

"Intriguingly, reporters from Novaya Gazeta were able to track down an unidentified prisoner in the Polar Wolf colony who told them that a 'strange commotion' had erupted in the prison on the evening of 15 February, before the official time of death. The secret prisoner said that the guards had accelerated their evening checks of the prisoners and strengthened security. In the morning of the 16th there was a 'total shakedown' of the prison, with guards confiscating mobile phones and other items from prisoners. Soon after, a committee from the central office of the Federal Penitentiary Service arrived, the prisoner said. Word spread throughout the prison that Navalny was dead at 10am Yamal time, 8am Moscow time, 0500 GMT, more than four hours before the official time of death."

"The whole point of Putin sending Navalny to Yamal was to break his spirit and within a month of arrival, he was cracking jokes about keeping warm in minus 32 degrees C inside the carcass of a hot, fried elephant. Once again, one is left thinking how much Putin must have hated him."

"The chances of civil war are high because, after the Prigozhin fireball, everybody knows that any deal, any promise backed by the word of Vladimir Putin has no value. In the long run, Navalny's prophecy from his dog kennel, of civil war, of a catastrophic failure of the Russian state, are more likely to come true than not."

"What few people in the West properly understood then, and still don't, to this day, is the extreme nervousness in the West Wing of the Biden White House that a Ukrainian victory in the war could lead to Russia becoming Iraq 2.0. Their number one neurosis is that a Ukrainian victory would lead to the fall of Putin and that, in turn, would end up with the breaking up of Russia liberating two dragons the Americans are very afraid of. The first dragon is an Islamist Chechnya getting hold of a nuke and holding the Western world to ransom while Donald Trump is on the stump. The second, more terrifying, dragon is of China seizing Siberia while Russia is in chaos. Overnight, China would become the biggest, most resource-rich country on earth. [...] The negative to promoting timidity as your number one strategy is that the other players in the game will notice and react aggressively, making the possibility of the things you fear the most coming true more likely than not. And there are three specific weaknesses: one, real Russian victory in Ukraine is a worst outcome than future possible Russian chaos; two, the break-up of the Russian Empire established by Peter the Great and Catherine is long overdue and trying to wallpaper over the Tsarist, Soviet and now Putinist cracks won't work; three, rewarding evil never ends well."

"It's his [Dmitry Peskov's] standard patter: ironically raise the possibility that the killings had something to do with his boss, then deny it, leaving both versions to drift like tumbleweed in the wind."

"So why did Prigozhin stop dead? My working hypothesis is that the secret police got to Prigozhin's family. For example, if his grandchildren had been kidnapped, then that might well have forced him to call off his mutiny. In return, the word on the street was, Prigozhin and his lieutenants would be granted immunity because of their previous heroics. But would Putin honour his word?"

"Unlike Shoigu and Gerasimov and, don't even whisper it, Putin himself, Prigozhin would go to the front line and be seen taking risks."

"He [Prigozhin] became the Kremlin's court jester, but beside the jokes he was, in essence, the psychopath's psychopath, Putin's personal cook and personal sadist, a killer, torturer and hot-dog salesman turned multi-billionaire, troll farm boss and mercenary warlord."

"Navalny's calculation was that Putin would not dare have him killed. But, once he had gone back to Russia and was locked away inside the gulag, two facts changed that materially altered that calculation: one, Western liberalism recalibrated its position on Navalny, selling his stock, making it easier for the Kremlin to have him snuffed out; two, Putin started Russia's big war against Ukraine, blurring focus on the fate of one prisoner so much so that he began to be forgotten, that he was in an oubliette from which there could be no return."

"Watch Putin's Palace. More than one hundred million people have. Think of the money squandered on dross while ordinary Russians live in poverty. Think, too, on Putin's taste. Get inside Alexei Navalny's head. Why did he go back to Russia to face near certain death? Because he was sick of Putin the thief, sick of his great robbery of Russian wealth and sick of Putin's fouler robbery of the Russian soul. Navalny went back to Moscow because the other tsar, while controlling perhaps the greatest accumulation of private wealth in human history, built himself a temple to Cupid Stunt."

"Navalny's documentary is gripping because it reveals both the immensity of the tsar's wealth but also the shabbiness of his soul. Dictators murder decor like they murder people. Idi Amin's sordid bungalow, Saddam's pre-cast cement palaces in Northern Iraq, Kim Il Sung's waxwork house, I've seen them all and they smack – how can I put this diplomatically? – of Cupid Stunt. [...] The palace estate stretches out for 70 million square metres, is owned by the FSB, fully leased until 2068 for 'research and educational activities', boasts state-of-the-art communication towers, its own gas station and boilers. There is an almighty fence to keep out the riff-raff, an amphitheatre, a secret tunnel leading from the palace to the beach, a window cut in bare rock so that the dictator can admire a sea view just like a Bond villain from his lair."

"The reality was for a long time that Putin, when facing off against Navalny, felt fear. People forget that before the 'swaggering... sneery... dismissive' strong man Putin, witnessed during the time of the Iraq War by Alastair Campbell, there existed a weak man Putin, who carried the bags of Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; who meekly said 'yes, boss, no boss' to Boris Berezovsky when the oligarch was fishing around for a replacement for Boris Yeltsin; who conned the Yeltsin family too with his subservient act; then did the same thing for Blair and George W. Bush. The tricky thing to get your head around is that weak man Putin was a performance but it was also part of the truth, that when up against an unflinching enemy, he has history of backing down, of being far more fearful than the far better understood sneery side of his character would suggest."

"What's so pathetic about Putin's world view is that anything that makes him look weak can only be the work of the CIA. The possibility that Russian citizens working with free-spirited Western journalists and a Bulgarian Sherlock Holmes could get the better of him and his goons is not allowed."

"To the layman, to someone like, say, Vladimir Putin, Novichok is famously untraceable, being lethal in tiny amounts, clear and smelling of nothing. That is so to the naked eye and, er, naked nose. But a good chemistry prof with a very good lab can detect the presence of the modified protein in parts per billion, so, actually, if you know what you are doing, Novichok is not untraceable at all. If you are on the case with your protein structures, it is like following a burglar's footprints in the snow."

"[...] the two 'sports health technicians' who visited Salisbury to admire the famous '123-metre spire' were morons sent by morons. [...] Did no one close to Putin have the courage to say to him, 'Listen, Boss, if we use Novichok against Skripal there is a very good chance that the British will work it out'. Clearly no one had. Perhaps Putin doesn't care. Perhaps showing hat he is willing to take extreme risks to kill people he considers traitors is the point."

"Was Russia a police state, I asked Navalny? 'Absolutely, one hundred per cent', he replied. 'Police state' didn't do Putin's Moscow justice. It felt like Berlin, 1938."

"Russia and the true nature of Russian power is fabulously hard to read. You can watch the Bentleys swish by and drink cocktails in the Metropol Hotel and not get it that you are living inside a twenty-first century kleptocracy which will crush you if you choose not to accept its crooked rules. All becomes much clearer, much faster, close to light-speed fast, when you challenge the source of that power, the secret police state within a state."

"[...] the evidence is compelling that Putin's record was murderous from the get-go. What I suspect happened is that the Blair government didn't want to examine his scoresheet by February 2000 – the Skuratov kompromat, the Moscow apartment bombs, levelling Grozny – too closely because it was so depressing. They were hyper-focused on the immediate geo-strategic nightmare in front of their eyes, that posed by radical Islam, not realising that another, greater threat to Western security was sitting in the Kremlin. Like Jack in the panto, Blair and Campbell traded the cow for some magical beans and realised too late, that they had been taken for a ride by a psychopathic conman."

"The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant' from the Soviet issue gas mask which has a corrugated tube hanging down from the face mask to the filter which looks like an elephant's trunk. They would tie a Chechen captive's arms behind his back, place him on the chair, fix 'The Elephant' over his face, unscrew the filter and then squirt CS gas up the tube so the victim would start to drown in his own tears, vomit and snot. One Chechen victim told me for our BBC Radio 5 documentary, Victims of the Torture Train: 'Once the gas mask was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they would squirt CS gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask in the room would make people confess to anything'. Imagine my horror when I went to a police station in newly liberated Kherson in Ukraine twenty-two years later which had been used as a torture chamber. And there, in the basement, was an Elephant gas mask, without the filter."

"Studying how 'counter-terrorism' functions in Putin's Russia is worth the substantial effort. In March 2024, 144 Russians were massacred by members of Islamic State-Khorasan Province in the Crocus City Hall shopping mall in Moscow. The authorities tried to shift the blame on to the Ukrainians with absurd and unbelievable evidence. It turned out that the United States intelligence community had warned their Russian counterpart that IS-K were planning an attack in that very shopping mall, but the Moscow authorities were caught napping. Quite how the IS-K killers could succeed in killing so many innocent people becomes less puzzling when you understand how Russian counter-terrorism officers spend their time: not infiltrating extremist organisations but planning the blinding of the leader of the opposition."

"His first downfall came in late 2004 when Putin sacked him. Kasyanov was considered to have been a good prime minister, but in the late nineties he was first nicknamed 'Misha Two Per Cent', a reference to the two per cent stake he allegedly took from government deals. Kasyanov says Putin himself brought up the nickname during their last meeting in December 2004: 'Remember that name if you ever decide to go over to the opposition', was Putin's threat. His second downfall was the sex tape during which the couple, as every political couple does the world over, slagged off their allies, Navalny included. Kasyanov carried on for a bit, a bird with a broken wing, but his career in Russian politics was dead. That left only one man standing: Navalny."