People From London

"Sex and politics - sex and politicians. I never understand how any politician gets a shag, really. Can you? A classic example: the David Mellor sex scandal. I bet you're the same as me. We're not shocked by these scandals involving politicians. I bet when that happened, your response was not 'Good God, that's outrageous! A man in his job, he should be running the country, not messing about like this; no wonder we're in a state; terrible!' No, that wasn't the response. You open the paper, you read about that, and you go 'Ha ha ha ha - I don't think so, Dave! I don't think so. In your dreams, perhaps.' The interesting person in that relationship is not him; it's her - Antonia. A woman of mystery; a mystery woman. Antonia de Sancha, always described as an 'unemployed actress'. Unemployed actress? How's she an unemployed actress? God! if you can feign sexual interest in David Mellor, I should think Chekhov's a piece of piss. So, she thinks 'I'm an actress. It's a role. I'll prepare'. She gets to the bedroom situation. He's in a kit-off situation, and there's Antonia giving it 'Red lorry, yellow lorry - Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper'. But the hair - that's the main unattractive thing. What barber told him that suited him? Someone winding him up there. 'Yes, David, that'll suit you, mate: a greasy, oily flap of dirty-looking patent leather, wafting about down one side of your moosh; that'll drive those unemployed actresses mental!' (Linda Live, 1993)"

"It'd be ludicrous, because the idea of the British Empire is such an outmoded idea. The British Empire now, if it were a being, would be living out its days in some sunshine home on the South Coast, wouldn't it? - boring the tits off everyone, shuffling around in oversize slippers, boring everyone with their press cuttings of when they were famous: 'Ooh look! ooh yes! I was very popular in the world once. Ooh yes! I went all over the world. Look, you see here; they loved me here - Sri Lanka. Of course, we used to call that Ceylon. Now, let me see; what have we here? Oh yes! they loved us there - Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe! Of course, we didn't call it Zimbabwe then. It was Rhodesia. Rhodesia, you see? And this; oh, this marvelous tour I had here - now what was it? India! India - what did we used to call that? Oh yes... Ours!'"

"And another thing I like about cricket is, because most of the commentators apart from Boycott and Trueman are very old-worldly, they have an innocence and naïveté about them, that makes them sometimes say, in the course of their commentary, inadvertently rude things: 'Now we're at the start of play, and we're coming in to play; and the bowler's Holding, the batman's Willey'; 'Here we are, and we're about to commence play. And there's Simpson, in his usual position, standing with his legs wide open, at first slip, waiting for a tickle.'"

"So, anyway, I think I'll go visit my nan: knock on the door; she's in the kitchen there, bottling up little gingham-top jars of racial hatred. So, I think 'Right, I'll avoid anything that's going to provoke her, because there's no point arguing with someone who, strictly speaking, isn't even alive. So I'll keep off anything controversial'. But you can forget that, because you just get this monologue. The line of logic is harder to follow than the plot of Finnegans Wake: 'Hello, Nan.' 'Hello, our Lin, it's lovely to see you. Come in. I hate blacks. Come in. Sit down. I'll make you a nice cup of tea, our Lin. I hate blacks. Come on in, our Lin. Would you like a nice piece of cake? I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I don't like black people.' You think 'Oh Christ! Shut up! What can I do? What can I do to divert her from this monomania? Right, OK': 'Garden looks lovely, Nan.' 'Oh, yes, Lin; I like a bit of gardening - unlike black people, who I don't like at all.' 'I think it's gonna rain.' 'So do I, Linda, I also think President Botha should be running this country.'"

"For the Government, it is quite hard for them to find media faces – to find people to head up campaigns – because they are all so weird-looking, aren't they? They all look like Muppets who have been left too close to a radiator. I don't like to mock the afflicted, but how did anyone know that Willie Whitelaw had had a stroke? What genius spotted that? I mean, with most people it's quite a dramatic change, isn't it? But what happened? Someone thought 'Oh, Willie's dribbled an extra pint today. What's going on? We'll run a few tests'."

"Turn for some crumb of comfort to the Labour Party? Forget it! The Labour Party seem to be packaging themselves like a pack of toilet paper, at the moment – sort of going for this pastel-politics look; this sort of Labour, Little Rose; a kind of tampon that uses the same logo, called 'Femmes'. Perhaps it would be even less socialist to call themselves Labs; Labies: 'Safe, strong, soft Neil Kinnock, absorbs all kinds of shit except socialism. Expands width-wise to include everybody.'"

"Oh God, the bed and breakfast! Why is it that British people can't cope with the idea of the paying guest? It's like you pay these people to stay there, but you try and act as inconspicuous as you possibly can. It's like no financial transaction's taken place. It's as though you've just imposed yourself off the street; and they think 'Who the fuck are you? You've not just paid me £25, have you, to stay here?' First you try the lounge – the TV lounge. Suddenly you are in Poland – martial law – because there's a curfew. You're watching a film; the telly goes off at 11.30; a bloke standing over you, shouting 'I've got to get up at six o'clock this morning. What time are you going to bed?' – 'All right, yes; we're going now; we're going now.' You go up to bed with a sinking heart, which sinks even further when you open the door and find – ughh! - the MAUVE CANDLEWICK BEDSPREAD! Now this is a bad sign, because it is now on the cards that you are going to open up that bed and find MAUVE NYLON SHEETS. You get in there, and it's like sleeping between two pieces of velcro."

"People say 'Ooh, doesn't Lionel Blair look good for his age?' Well, no, not really – not unless he's about five hundred. Otherwise he looks like nothing more than an elaborately coiffured scrotum."

"[On the prospect of Margaret Thatcher's death] Be serious - this is just a fantasy, because if she were killed, would it actually make any difference? Would things get any better? Course they wouldn't; don't kid yourself. They'd get worse, because she would become a martyr – this monetarist martyr - a cult figure, like Eva Peron. Can you imagine the televised funeral? There she'd be, laid out in a glass coffin, in the blue gear, the hair-do and all the rest of it. She'd be laying there just really life-like - just like she was in life - a bit warmer. It would be on the telly. You thought Winston Churchill was bad; you can imagine what this would be like. And then, of course, it wouldn't stop at that. There would be films - The Night Brighton Rocked. There'd be musicals. Tim Rice would be churning out the musicals about her life - Magita. There'd be Elaine Page belting out the big numbers: 'Don't Cry for Me, Barnet Finchley'."

"He force-fed his daughter with some mechanically recovered beef fragments [...] on TV to show there was no danger from BSE. [...] She's probably a teenager now. Most teenagers just irrationally hate their parents. You wouldn't want to be round their house of a Christmas: 'Let's watch that film, when you tried to kill me. Yes I would like a flat, thank you.'"

"You should always book tradesmen by personal recommendation."

"Clive Anderson: Don't give him the oxygen of publicity. Smith: I'm not that happy with him having the oxygen of oxygen, actually. He's been released to the - I must say - somewhat cryogenic embrace of Mary. He went forth - a big great snog - and she just swerved in a way that none of our English Cricket Team are able to do. The message was loud and clear. You've heard this many times from prostitutes, Jeffrey. No kissing!"

"London water – it’s hard but fair."

"Rugby is a game for men with no fear of brain injury."

"Piers Morgan who used to be editor of The Mirror. He's got a whole new career now, as the bloke who used to be editor of The Mirror."

"I sort of sympathise with them looking for weapons of mass destruction, because I'm like that with scissors. Honestly, I just turn the house upside down. Of course the difference is, I know I have got some scissors."

"This is Prince Charles & Camilla. Or, as I like to think of them, Rod Hull & Emu."

"Paul Merton: (on the subject of people wearing bow-ties) People wear bow-ties because it's show-business, isn't it? I mean there's Bernard Manning there. I mean, obviously he is in show-business, and Neil Hamilton desperately would like to be in show-business. But that's the idea isn't it? Linda Smith: I don't really like you saying his name, because it gives him the oxygen of publicity and I'm not happy with him having the oxygen of oxygen."

"Gordon Jackson! (throughout)"

"[Of a recipe for Chilli Con Carne] English people may like to substitute a sponge cake at this point. (Series 1, Episode 6)"

"As Linda drifted in and out of consciousness, her fellow comedian Mark Steel noticed Joan Collins on the television. “I was on a chat show with Joan Collins,” he told fellow comedian Andy Hamilton. "How old is she?" Hamilton asked. "I think she must be close to 75," replied Steel. From beneath the pile of bedclothes a little voice piped up: “How much is that in human years?”"

"[On her home town in Kent:] Erith isn't twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham."

"People knock ASBOs but you have to bear in mind they are the only qualification some of these kids are going to get."

"If God wanted us to believe in him, he'd exist."

"My favourite ever headline was "Worksop Man Dies Of Natural Causes.""

"Man was formed for society and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it."

"Manchester is the chimney of the world. Rich rascals, poor rogues, drunken ragamuffins and prostitutes form the moral; soot made into paste by rain the physique, and the only view long chimney: what a place! The entrance to hell realised!"

"War is detestable and not to be desired by a nation’, adding, 'It falls not so heavily upon soldiers – it is our calling; but its horrors alight upon the poor, upon the miserable, upon the unhappy, upon those who feel the expense and the suffering, but have not the glory."

"Come here instantly. Come here at once and make your submission, or I will in a week tear you from the midst of your village and hang you."

"The human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear."

"the great receipt for quieting a country is a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards: the wildest chaps are thus tamed."

"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

"The fact still remains, that Blackstone first rescued the law of England from chaos. He did, and did exceedingly well, for the end of the eighteenth century, what Coke tried to do, and did exceedingly ill, about 150 years before; that is to say, he gave an account of the law as a whole, capable of being studied, not only without disgust, but with interest and profit. If we except the Commentaries of Chancellor Kent, which were suggested by Blackstone, I should doubt whether any work intended to describe the whole of the law of any country possessed anything like the same merits. His arrangement of the subject is, I think, defective, for reasons which have often been given, but a better work of the kind has not yet been written, and, with all its defects, the literary skill with which a problem of extraordinary difficulty has been dealt with is astonishing."

"Blackstone's declaration respecting the civil death of married women haunted many other outstanding leaders in the woman movement of the middle period. Although Matilda Joslyn Gage tried to meet it by a curious display of logic, she regarded it as a statement of the law. "After marriage," she declared in 1852, "the husband and wife are considered as one person in law, which I hold to be false from the very laws applicable to married parties. Were it so, the act of one would be as binding as the act of the other;...were it so, a woman could not legally be a man's inferior. Such a thing would be a veritable impossibility. One-half of a person cannot be made the protection or direction of the other half. Blackstone says 'a woman may indeed be attorney for her husband, for that implies no separation from, but rather a representation of, her lord. And a husband may also bequeath anything to his wife by will; for it cannot take effect till the coverture is determined by his death." After stating at considerable length the reasons showing their unity, the learned commentator proceeds to cut the knot, and show they are not one, but are considered as two persons, one superior, the one inferior, and not only so, but the inferior in the eye of the law as acting from compulsion"...At the Woman's Rights Convention held in Syracuse the following year, 1853, Mrs. Gage recurred to the subject and spoke as if equity and legislation had made no changes in the "disabilities" of married women at common law. She affirmed that "the legal disabilities of women" are numerous; that they are only known to those who bear them; that they "are acknowledged by Kent, Story, and many other legal authorities." Without directing attention to those pages of Kent and Story which set forth at length the equitable principles by which common-law rules could be and often were nullified, Mrs. Gage went on with her oration: "A wife has no management in the joint earnings of herself and her husband; they are entirely under control of the husband, who is obliged to furnish the wife merely the common necessaries of life; all that she receives beyond these is looked upon by the law as a favor, and not held as her right. A mother is denied the custody of her own child; a most barbarous and unjust law, which robs her of the child placed in her care by the great Creator himself. A widow is allowed the use merely of one-third of the real estate left at the husband's death; and when her minor children have grown up she must surrender the personal property, even to the family Bible, and the pictures of her dear children. In view of such laws the women engaged in this movement ask that the wife shall be made heir to the husband to the same extent that he is now her heir...."The present law of divorce is very unjust; the husband, whether the innocent or the guilty party, retaining all the wife's property, has also the control of the children unless by special decree of the court they are assigned to the mother." For the gentle Quaker, Lucretia Mott, one of the most persuasive American women of her time, Blackstone was no less an unquestioned authority than he was for Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Gage. After hearing Richard H. Dana deliver a lecture in 1849 ridiculing "the new demand of American womanhood for civil and political rights," Mrs. Mott also delivered a lecture, in reply to the Boston orator."

"My good lord, till of late I could never, with any satisfaction to myself, answer that question; but, since the publication of Mr. Blackstone's Commentaries I can never be at a loss. There your son will find analytical reasoning diffused in a pleasing and perspicuous style. There he may imbibe imperceptibly the first principles on which our excellent laws are founded, and THERE he may become acquainted with an uncouth crabbed author, Coke upon Littleton, who has disappointed and disheartened many a Tyro, but who cannot fail to please in a modern dress."

"We are no admirers of the political doctrines laid down in Blackstone's Commentaries. But if we consider that those Commentaries were read with great applause in the very schools where, seventy or eighty years before, books had been publicly burned by order of the University of Oxford for containing the damnable doctrine that the English monarchy is limited and mixed, we cannot deny that a salutary change had taken place."

"It can be said with confidence that he showed a very firm grasp of every branch of law which he was called upon to handle. No problem found him wanting in anxious consideration and sensible conclusion. If there were few diamonds in his judicial necklace, at least there were no gewgaws."

"As a judge he showed himself most workmanlike, and it would be hard to find any decision in which he failed to attain a high standard. He was certainly outstanding among his colleagues, who, though sound lawyers, did not rise above mediocrity, and were at any rate overshadowed by their contemporaries in the Court of King's Bench."

"He was the greatest exponent of the common law that we have ever had... To this we owe his immortal Commentaries on the Laws of England. In four books. They were the product of his lectures over a period of twelve years. The work was at once acclaimed as a classic by lawyers and by men of letters. It has remained a classic ever since. I have an early edition in my library. I refer to it constantly when I want to know what the law was in his day. I am always amazed at the breadth of his knowledge, the research which he did, the style of his prose, and his statement of principles. It is the greatest law-book that we have ever had."

"Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey."

"I say...upon this point, what JUDGE BLACKSTONE says; and that is, that the right to resist oppression always exists, but that those who compose the nation at any given time must be left to judge for themselves when oppression has arrived at a pitch to justify the exercise of such right."

"In the history of American institutions, no other book — except the Bible — has played so great a role as Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Before the American Revolution, according to Edmund Burke, it had sold nearly as many copies in the colonies as in England. Even without Blackstone, the Americans surely would have fought their Revolution and doubtless would have preserved English institutions in America. But the convenient appearance of the Commentaries within the decade before the Declaration of Independence made it much easier for Americans to see what they were preserving; and made it feasible to perpetuate those institutions in remote villages without trained lawyers or law libraries. From Blackstone we can learn even more about what the American colonists were defending than by reading the violent tracts of Thomas Paine."

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."

"The founders of the English laws have with excellent forecast contrived, that no man should be called to answer to the king for any capital crime, unless upon the preparatory accusation of twelve or more of his fellow subjects, the grand jury: and that the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment, information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours, indifferently chosen, and superior to all suspicion. So that the liberties of England cannot but subsist, so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate, not only from all open attacks, (which none will be so hardy as to make) but also from all secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it; by introducing new and arbitrary methods of trial, by justices of the peace, commissioners of the revenue, and courts of conscience. And however convenient these may appear at first, (as doubtless all arbitrary powers, well executed, are the most convenient) yet let it be again remembered, that delays, and little inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must pay for their liberty in more substantial matters; that these inroads upon this sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposite to the spirit of our constitution; and that, though begun in trifles, the precedent may gradually increase and spread, to the utter disuse of juries in questions of the most momentous concern."

"Of crimes injurious to the persons of private subjects, the most principal and important is the offense of taking away that life, which is the immediate gift of the great creator; and which therefore no man can be entitled to deprive himself or another of, but in some manner either expressly commanded in, or evidently deducible from, those laws which the creator has given us; the divine laws, I mean, of either nature or revelation."

"All the several pleas and excuses, which protect the committer of a forbidden act from the punishment which is otherwise annexed thereto, may be reduced to this single consideration, the want or defect of will. An involuntary act, as it has no claim to merit, so neither can it induce any guilt: the concurrence of the will, when it has its choice either to do or to avoid the fact in question, being the only thing that renders human actions either praiseworthy or culpable. Indeed, to make a complete crime, cognizable by human laws, there must be both a will and an act."

"That the king can do no wrong, is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution."

"There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right."

"Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary."

"The royal navy of England hath ever been its greatest defense and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of our island."