University Of Oxford Alumni

"[On antisemitism in the Labour Party] It's funny these stories suddenly appeared when Jeremy Corbyn became leader, isn't it?"

"[On film executive Nat Cohen, then responsible (according to his rivals) for about 50% of film production in the UK] I found Nat very kind and helpful. [...] [A] lot of things went wrong in those films and I realise it now. I saw this but he didn't say a word and allowed me to finish. That's on a personal level. On a different level I find Nat's position in the film industry very disturbing. He has too much control over it. Do you know how he works? Every morning he studies the box office receipts and sees which films are making money and concentrates on those. So, slowly, the spectrum is becoming narrower and narrower."

"Notting Hill is two cities with two kinds of stories, the dreamlike and the deadly. One Notting Hill contains residents who paid more capital gains tax than three major British cities in 2020; in the other, looms Grenfell Tower, swaddled in rippling tarpaulin. These two depend on each other, because you only need a dreamworld if reality is unjust. Nowhere else in London is so polarised, or practices self-worship like this."

"When I was young, being female was not something to enjoy, but to navigate carefully: there was always a terrible jeopardy in it. When I look back on the mild workplace assaults and the insinuations — so long ago I feel they were directed at a different woman — what strikes me most is how little they had to do with sex. I don't think men who harass women at work want sex: at least not principally. It is a function of inadequacy and the dominion that masks it: putting you on your knees, where you belong."

"[T]his is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder's, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema's most self-hating, and desolate, franchise."

"I've long thought that monarchy allows us to imagine our kingdom – our national story – as more interesting and singular than it is. Monarchy is attractive but necrotic: it looks backwards by nature. If there was an opportunity for dynamic monarchy – the Norman lawmakers, perhaps, or the Tudor propagandists – we haven't taken it. The instruments of monarchy are imperial, and in daylight they look increasingly odd and piteous. It's a truism of addiction – and many are addicted to monarchy – that the larger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one."

"His conclusion is darkly hilarious. Corbynism failed because he was not brave enough to defy the cabal: the people needed more antisemitism, and Corbyn denied them."

"It's a truism that every wretch in the village is a king on the day of the pogrom because he is not a Jew. And here is his book."

"Holocaust Memorial Day is 24 hours of shame, but not in the way you think. It was designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and it falls on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet forces: January 27, in 1945. This is tragedy enough for the Jewish people, you might think, but HMD — I don't mind giving it an acronym, it deserves one — has changed. It is now an annual festival for the abuse of living Jewish people and the denial of our loss, and we brace ourselves for the memory of the past, and the cruelty of the present. This was the worst year yet."

"I now know my generation of Jews is the luckiest in modern history. I never saw antisemitism in my youth. I know that others did. OK, a boy at my school shouted, "Jew" at me once, but I knew it was lust. Likewise, a boy at my college – a devout Christian – also shouted "Jew" at me once, but I think his DNA test would come up 25 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish at least, and we both knew it."

"[In the book under review] When left-wing activists — Momentum, for instance? — organise, it is righteous, but when "Zionists" organise, it is sinister."

"Truss did not fall: it is worse than that. Rather, and obediently, she shattered."

"[T]he Corbynites, who live on fantasies and conspiracies, can convince themselves of anything except their complicity in their own failure."

"Still, on he goes, glibly, hearing nothing he does not want to hear, and seeing nothing he does not want to see: a god in tiny rooms."

"I met [[Liz Truss|[Liz] Truss]] at university, long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart."

"Then Jackie Walker of Momentum said, "Anti-Semitism is no more special than any other form of racism." There was an ovation. I think it was the line they had been waiting for. What did I hear in that small sentence? Perhaps I am oversensitive. My mother is a historian of the Holocaust. She has traveled around Europe since the Eighties, teaching people how to teach the Holocaust in the countries where it took place. I can tell you, without recourse to any reference book, that there isn't a favorable mention of Jews in European literature until Gotthold Lessing's The Jews, in 1749. I can tell you that when Edward I expelled the Jews from En­gland in 1290, a ship captain, having taken their money for passage, dumped some on a sandbank, and left them to die. I did not hear a passing remark. I heard a deep rebuke from Walker that spoke of general, and eternal, Jewish immorality: that Jewish concern for Jewish safety and for the memory of Jewish dead is something tainted."

"Enter the contemptible George Galloway. After Liverpool won the Champions League on Saturday, the former Labour and Respect MP tweeted his congratulations to the winning team ... then traduced Tottenham Hotspur fans, many of whom are Jewish, by writing: "No #Israël flags on the Cup!" He meant: no sticky Jewish fingers on British football."

"I am afraid now, though it is hard to write about fear because fear is formless and because it offends my pride. I have heard the silence of my non-Jewish friends with horror because they, apparently progressives, should know better. I can't write more, for maybe one day I may want to speak to them again."

"Hollywood is greedy and prone to self-mythologising to conceal that simple greed: the very faults that [[Citizen Kane|[Citizen] Kane]] satirized. The town's treatment of Kane, the definitive account of American desire and corruption on film, is as ludicrous – and sensitive – now as then. Mank, David Fincher's fictionalised account of the creation of Kane, is up for 10 Academy Awards this weekend. If it equals, or even surpasses, its creation myth, it will be a bleak joke: one that both [[Orson Welles|[Orson] Welles]] and [Herman J. Mankiewicz] would get or, if they had the chance, would have written themselves. (Welles died in 1985; Mank in 1953.) It is, consciously or not – and I would guess not - theft masquerading as tribute and that is the only profound truth it tells. This is a bad habit in Hollywood, and one to which it is increasingly addicted."

"In his actions on child abuse and Aids, Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Pope John Paul II's chief enforcer), it was Ratzinger's job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades. And how did he do it? In May 2001 he wrote a confidential letter to Catholic bishops, ordering them not to notify the police – or anyone else – about the allegations, on pain of excommunication. He referred to a previous (confidential) Vatican document that ordered that investigations should be handled "in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence". Excommunication is a joke to me, perhaps to you, but to a Catholic it means exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect a child. Well, God is love."

"And so to the church's own holocaust – in Africa. Condoms can protect Africans from Aids. But who can protect them from Ratzinger? The Catholic church has long pursued a no-condoms policy."

"I read social media all week, and it is a maelstrom. One man says he laughed on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another says the Final Solution wasn't final enough. Yet another says the world is run "mostly" for the benefit of Jews. I'm called a genocidaire, immune to non-Jewish suffering. I present my credentials – a Liberal Zionist, in favour of two states – which are dismissed, since, to some, all Zionists exist in a state of pre-murder. The most sympathetic people are religious Christians, which initially confuses me: I am contrite, and grateful to them. I am not grateful for "allies" who use Jews to pursue their vendetta against Muslims – and if you mention European anti-Semitism, they insult you and withdraw, for you have disappointed them."

"Celebrity involvement in politics is a wretched thing. It should be consigned to dust, especially post-Jimmy Savile – who spent many holidays at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher, during which he used to write "In case of national emergency, phone Jimmy Savile" on every notepad in the house, should you need a nightmarish image to chew on. Have our leaders not learned to hide from these terrible narcissists? Celebrity is trivial, and when it moves close to power, it trivialises that too. The gongs for light entertainment heroes, meanwhile, insult everybody: a gong for a laugh. Is leering on Strictly Come Dancing and clutching female contestants' arms really a public service meriting a knighthood?"

"[At Gold's third visit to Russell Brand's Trews Musings event] There is a deep vein of savagery inside Brand, something completely animalistic, but its twin is there too: something much softer, and terribly vulnerable. Watching these Brands fight it out is, in totality, his allure. His cult is based on the premise that individualism is destroying us. But he cannot shrug off his own ego. It is a very noisy dichotomy. At the end, he loiters. He has long, slow closed-eye hugs with men and women; the air is damp with lust masquerading as political intent. The Trews is not a political experience, not at all. Brand has founded a small religion, and it will not outlive him. He is an addict populating a space vacated by conventional politics; he is a symptom of the very ennui he hates. And he couldn’t swing an election."

"[Stuart] Jeffries is genuinely criticising a documentary about a massacre on the grounds that including the victims' stories means the film is slanted towards sympathy with the victims. It isn’t so much immoral as amoral – unable to deal with evil as evil, always seeking to relativise, and thus diminish, it."

"'Oh Jeremy Corbyn' refers, of course, to the Glastonbury chanting in 2017. Nostalgia has its uses, but when it serves only to highlight your utter irrelevance six years on, it's not so great an idea. All those three words serve to illustrate is how far the world has left the cult behind. In 2023, far from singing along, Glastonbury has pulled the film. Those poor Corbynites; they don’t even have a field in Somerset any more."

"The Big Lie was first used by Hitler in Mein Kampf, to describe what he called the use by Jews of a lie so huge that no one would believe someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". He was referring to what he said was Jews blaming German general Erich Ludendorff for defeat in World War One - a lie designed to remove "the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland [the Jews] to Justice." The phrase was subsequently widely used to describe the Nazis' propaganda technique to poison Germany against "international Jewry", the real holders of power in the world. In other words, the title 'The Big Lie' reminds people that the Corbynites share with the Nazis an obsession with Jews."

"The Bolshevik philosophy is simply the reductio ad absurdum of the principles implicit in bourgeois culture and consequently it provides no real answer to the weaknesses and deficiencies of the latter. It takes the nadir of the European spiritual development for the zenith of the new order."

"In reality the existing tendency toward social uniformity is far from solving the problem of social organization; it merely provides the material, the unorganized mass, which has to be informed by living spirits and ordered to some higher end. Without this, social uniformity can mean no more than a reversion to barbarism, and democracy nothing more than the rule of the herd."

"For the Liberal the spiritual center of gravity was in the individual, and the realm of private opinion and private interests was the ideal world. Hence, when the Liberal spoke of religion as a purely private matter it was in compliment rather than in derogation. To separate the Church from the State — to keep religion out of politics, was to elevate it to a higher sphere of spiritual values. But today in the democratic world, these values have been reversed. The individual life has lost its spiritual primacy, and it is social life which has now the higher prestige, so that to treat religion as a purely individual and personal matter is to deprive it of actuality and to degrade it to a lower level of value and potency. To keep religion out of public life is to shut it up in a stuffy Victorian back drawing room with the aspidistras and antimacassars, when the streets are full of life and youth. And the result is that the religion of the Church becomes increasingly alienated from real life while democratic society creates a new religion of the street and the forum to take its place."

"This distrust of the bourgeois is no modern phenomenon. It has its roots in a much older tradition than that of socialism. It is equally typical of the mediaeval noble and peasant, the romantic Bohemian and the modern Proletarian. The fact is that the bourgeoisie has always stood somewhat apart from the main structure of European society, save in Italy and in the Low Countries. While the temporal power was in the hands of the kings and the nobles and the spiritual power was in the hands of the Church, the bourgeois, the Third Estate, occupied a position of privileged inferiority which allowed them to amass wealth and to develop considerable intellectual culture and freedom of thought without acquiring direct responsibility or power. Consequently, when the French Revolution and the fall of the old regime made the bourgeoisie the ruling class in the West, it retained its inherited characteristics, its attitude of hostile criticism towards the traditional order and its enlightened selfishness in the pursuit of its interest. But although the bourgeois now possessed the substance of power he never really accepted social responsibility as the old rulers had done. He remained a private individual — an idiot in the Greek sense — with a strong sense of social conventions and personal rights, but with little sense of social solidarity and no recognition of his responsibility as the servant and representative of a super-personal order. In fact, he did not realize the necessity of such an order, since it had always been provided for him by others, and he had taken it for granted."

"Still more insidious is the hidden bias of the BBC. Most of it is subtle, and all the more dangerous for that. Take the use of the word terrorist. Both the US state department and the UK government, along with the rest of the EU, classify Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "terrorist organisations". Even Palestinians have used the term "terror" to describe attacks on Israeli civilians: on the BBC World Service on December 4 2001, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority security service, referred to the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa as "terror attacks"; on Newsnight the same day, Nabil Abourdeneh, an adviser to Yasser Arafat, referred to Palestinian militants as "terrorist groups". But not the BBC's correspondents themselves. When they refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad they call them not "terrorists" but "militants", "hard liners" and "radicals"."

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."

"I learnt more during my school-days from my visits to the Cathedral at Winchester than I did from the hours of religious instruction in school. That great church with its tombs of the Saxon kings and the mediaeval statesmen-bishops gave one a greater sense of the magnitude of the religious element in our culture and the depths of its roots in our national life than anything one could learn from books."

"The Big Lie is not the first big lie to come from the Corbynites and it won’t be the last. On social media, #ItWasAScam is the hashtag that usefully links them together. I’ve long been intrigued by one of defining characteristics of the Corbybnites, which is often thought too rude to state plainly. They are, like their leader, very stupid. Nothing better illustrates this than a film intended to show how Labour’s antisemitism scandal wasn’t real, which deals obsessively with how Jews control British politics. See what I mean?"

"Some would ask what would be the advantage to Nigeria if women were wholly emancipated. I should like to submit four immediate obvious results: Abuse of power by men and arrogance will lessen; opinion of women would be more beneficial and influential, for there are certain matters which women could tackle better than men; better and happier homes and a better nation."

"I would have considered coming to address what I knew would be a large and critical audience as the greatest ordeal I have ever had to go through if it was not for the fact that I had three points which urged me to accept the invitation of the Youth movement. The subject ‘The Emancipation of Women in Nigeria’ is one in which I am naturally deeply interested and one about which I feel most keenly."

"Tossed in a sea of intellect with highly earnest students mitigate the dangers of the individualistic and capitalistic attitude gradual process of introducing people into a foreign country and to foreign life."

"Brains have no sex … You can do as well and even better than some boys."

"Someone had to be first."

"Gradual process of introducing people into a foreign country and to foreign life."

"The progress of earlier graduates paved the way for a new generation of black, female Rhodes Scholars."

"Women are now seen in the offices and shops. They work as nurses, health visitors, midwives, teachers, telephonists. Year after year, more openings are given to women. Two girls are now in training at the Higher College as dispensers."

"They are still static. I submit that the women of Nigeria were not much more under subjection of men in the olden days than they are now. In no part of the world today are men much more pampered and spoilt than they are in Nigeria. Does one ever see a group of women standing and sitting in the street corners of Lagos? No, the loafers are the men. They are the ones who have the time for Ayo, Ludo and Draughts. A strange thing happens; say an arrest is made; a crowd collects. Whom does one find in the crowd? – Men. It is the men who seem to have the time to waste."

"[On the issue of sewage in rivers, lakes and the sea] I'm not denying its a big issue but it always has been. I remember as a child in south Wales swimming in sewage. Jackson's Bay in Barry used to be a sewage outlet where we all went and paddled and swam - it was regarded as acceptable."

"Throughout the journey from the coast to Fatehpur, for instance, the Fathers found that the Hindu temples had been destroyed by the Mohammedans."

"Knowledge, as we have said before, is one. Its division into subjects is but a concession to human weakness."

"The Russian Revolution and Soviet policy were seen by others, both at the time and subsequently, in part in terms of earlier concerns. Sir Halford Mackinder, Britain’s leading geopolitician as well as a politician, was British High Commissioner in South Russia during the Russian Civil War. He pressed the Cabinet in January 1920 on the danger of ‘a new Russian Czardom of the Proletariat’ and of ‘Bolshevism, sweeping forward like a prairie fire’ towards India, the core of Britain’s overseas empire, and ‘lower Asia’. Such accounts presented Communism as giving renewed energy to established geopolitical drives, notably the Russian threat to the British empire in South Asia (the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’), and to British interests and influence in South-West Asia. This theme has been given even longer-term resonance in some recent scholarship. In offering a borderland perspective on the origins of the Cold War, significantly after the latter was over, Alfred Rieber saw the Cold War as ‘a phase in a prolonged struggle over the Eurasian borderlands that stretches back to the early modern period, when the great polyethnic, bureaucratic conquest empires began to reverse a thousand years of nomadic military hegemony over sedentary cultures’. More of the literature looked for continuity between the Soviet Union and Romanov Russia, and notably with the expansionism of both, for example the search for warm-water ports."

"One young man summed things up towards the desperate, tired end. "Is there any policy you can offer me that would positively impact my life?" he whinnied. The sense of hurt entitlement and rage: me, me, me. Is Sunak a political vending machine? That's where politics is now: give me what I demand at all times."

"Why does Stanley Johnson even want a knighthood? ... Scan his CV and you will see how incredibly easy life has been for him. He comes from a generation of men for whom jobs, wives, money and houses fell like confetti — knighthoods grew on trees. You can still see the sheer power of this system in, say, the behaviour of Fiona Bruce on Question Time on Thursday, when she rushed to defend Stanley against accusations he'd abused his first wife: friends of his said it was a "one-off", she claimed. "He hit me many times, over many years," is in fact what Charlotte Johnson said not long before she died in 2021."