Women Authors From England

"In the secular world, common sense must be the order of the day. It isn't reasonable not to have women occupying the same roles as men and vice versa. But in a religious sphere, where faith is the binding force of a group of people, rationale has less sway or place. If you started applying logic to the beliefs held in most faiths, things would start to fall apart pretty quickly at the seams."

"[The experience of a 24 year old sister of a friend] Just after finishing her master’s in economics, she started her first job at a City firm, full of ambition. But then she noticed something. There were no female board members – and all the way through the company there were far fewer women overall. Rosie invited a large cross section of her female colleagues out to lunch at a local deli and pushed them on the matter. The response? Blank faces all round. None of them had “ever noticed” anything. An awkward silence ensued. Rosie, not wanting to go overboard, dropped the issue. But, right at the end of the meal, the most senior woman present suddenly piped up. "I do sometimes wonder why all of the women who work here are so beautiful," she said. No one knew how respond to another difficult truth: it seemed that looks had played a part in the men's hiring decisions. Rosie, bruised and bemused by the experience, has just let matters lie. She has rent to pay."

"During that first meeting it became clear that this wasn't a party with a long shelf life. In fact the WEP aimed to influence the political debate and then die a dignified and valiant death – gender equality accomplished. Fast forward seven months and the party has officially launched."

"But I didn't want to move on. Not for a long while. I had formed a relationship with our baby, daring to map out a little of our future together. But beyond medical forms, conversations with my stunned and deeply saddened husband, my texts to people about our loss and my memories of such a bond, there was nothing else to show the whole episode happened. Like millions of women before me, the baby lived within me and died within me. My body and mind were the keeper and witness."

"[Barnett suffered a herniated disc four months after giving birth] I'd had a c-section and two and a half years of IVF and heavy steroids. I wasn't physically good going into the pregnancy or coming out of it. It was an unholy situation and one day I picked up my daughter and it went. It was agony trying to breastfeed, do the school run with my older son, hold my baby daughter through gritted teeth and put the car seat in. So I've also been doing months of physio, exercise and Pilates."

"Beginning IVF can be like walking into a high-stakes casino. From the moment you first place a bet, submitting those first bloods or semen samples, you are hooked. Excitement, hope, long odds and croupiers in white coats keep you coming back for more. A tweak of meds here, a change of diet there, the rush of the pregnancy test after weeks of needles and pills, and then the massive low of the single blue line. It all leaves you vowing you will never, ever gamble again."

"My grandmother escaped the Nazis from Wiener Neustadt in Austria and found sanctuary as a housemaid in this country. My husband's grandmother survived unspeakable torture in Auschwitz. In Europe. A two-hour flight from here. I've been. He won't. He can't bear to. Our grandmothers, who read us bedtime stories safe in our beds in this country, this happened to them – people I met and loved. Only two weeks ago, I opened Twitter on my phone and saw "Jewish privilege" trending. Do you know how that feels? Do you how frightening that is? I have had my fair share of abuse online, much of it sexist or politically charged. But the one form of hate that always stops me in my tracks and makes me feel angry and sad and burned? Antisemitism."

"I personally found the first few months of motherhood discombobulating, knackering, joyous, emotional, frustrating and quite frankly odd."

"I can see why so many politicians are in for a shock when they come on Barnett's show. The cool ease with which she can segue from convivial to confrontational is quite unnerving."

"During the recent Tory leadership election, one of Boris Johnson’s emissaries struggled to defend his candidate’s erroneous claim about free trade under Gatt 24. After Barnett had conclusively exposed Johnson’s falsehood, he stuttered: "I don't believe he is incorrect." With deadpan scorn, she flashed back: "Because you don't believe facts?" To David Bull, a newly elected Brexit Party MEP who had complained on Twitter about his scandalous discovery that the journey to Strasbourg was quite long, she asked: "Did you not look up how you might get to the European parliament?" "Weirdly," he admitted, "it did not really cross my mind.""

"[On suffering from endometriosis] My body's been such an instrument of torture."

"My experience of periods is extreme because of my endometriosis. But while most women don't have a specific condition, they still often feel grim at that time of the month, require painkillers, need to access the loo more often and may suffer headaches, backache, sweatier brows and the squits."

"No one said achieving gender equality would be easy. But if the WEP has got a fighting chance it needs to set out its stall on all the big issues of the day – while keeping a laser-like focus on its main battles. That way it might become a credible party that can steal seats and influence people. To get their attention, the new party must target David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon where it hurts. Only then will the parties that dominate Britain be forced to reckon with it. And only then will the women of the WEP truly be able to say that they have achieved a new gender equality – and retire."

"Non-Jewish friends, colleagues and Wikipedia contributors alike, have mistakenly thought of me or described me as an Orthodox Jew. It is true I grew up with that, and it was the form of Judaism showcased to me on infrequent synagogue visits, but it does not, and never has, described my liberal and largely secular life."

"Earlier this week, male MPs struggled to say the same words in a debate about the so-called "tampon tax". This is the five per cent VAT rate that stubbornly remains on all period products – ineligible for zero rating because the European Commission deems tampons (oops, I mentioned them again) "non-essential" items. Try to telling that to any woman. Female MPs and campaigners have been fighting for years to remove this ludicrous levy. If nappies for children, maternity pads for new mothers and incontinence aids are all exempt, why does Brussels have a peculiar problem with blood?"

"Nearly 10 years ago, my father went to prison. I had just turned 23 and was heading home after a long day at work when my then boyfriend, now husband, rang me and delivered the news. I had known my dad was in trouble, but he kept his business life so separate, I didn’t even know he was going to court the day he ended up being imprisoned for living off immoral earnings."

"I know how to read Hebrew, but I've still got no idea what it means. I recognise certain tunes, but have no clue as to the order of the service. And while it would be easy to blame my seating arrangement, I'd still have very little idea of what was going on if my gender permitted me a ring side pew. So I have flip-flopped my way to a few Reform services. And while hearing more passages read in English and regular page number announcements are a comfort, I find myself feeling similarly isolated there. Reform Judaism's ways feel foreign because they lack the familiar rhythms of the Orthodox Judaism I grew up with. However, in Orthodox services I feel increasingly like an illiterate and ill-educated fool, suffering imposter syndrome."

"Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers."

"Anger at my father and the mess he had got himself into. Anger at the situation and anger that something I had no control over was threatening to control me. When your life implodes, either by your own doing or someone else’s, everything slows down. And I found myself presented at a young age with a stark choice: do I let myself be destroyed by a suffocating shame?"

"EB: You're holding your manifesto, you're flicking through it, you've got an iPad there, you’ve had a phone call while we're in here and you don't know how much it's going to cost? Jeremy Corbyn: Can we come back to that in a moment? EB: What, when you've looked it up?! My point is it's quite troubling, this is a policy you're launching today Mr Corbyn and you don't know how much it's going to cost. It hardly inspires the voters."

"[On her tolerance level] I'm OK with sexism, I'm OK with "you look shit", I'm quite good at laughing at the misogynistic stuff. [But she is upset by] the anti-semitic stuff. Because I really don't want that to be a thing in the country I live in — or anywhere."

"The bogus presumptions about menstruating women are tragically not confined to the history books — namely that we are weak, dirty, unhinged, less than and just different. At the heart of this lingering stigma is the idea that we are unequal to our male counterparts. Women then ingest these views and appropriate them as our own, inflicting wounds on ourselves and other women — and girls — around us. And by keeping periods unmentionable, women become unwitting accomplices in perpetuating these myths."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Mama Sarkar didn't raise a diplomat."

"I'm literally a communist, you idiot."

"The Titanic submarine is a modern morality tale of what happens when you have too much money, and the grotesque inequality of sympathy, attention and aid for those without it."

"No ones saying that Jewish people don’t experience racism. That’s obviously true, especially online. But unlike me, you can *also* benefit from white privilege."

"The unfortunate truth is that, sometimes, the only thing that separates an anonymous troll and a journalist is a byline. Some of the worst abuse I’ve received is either from journalists or the direct consequence of their actions in spreading misinformation about me."

"I'm on Team Hate."