Women Authors From England

"[T]he Farage approach, much like that of Boris, is not only fun for the man, it seems to be just as fun for the woman."

"But increasingly "gender critical feminist" is simply becoming another term for members of the public who are not willing to put up with this madness."

"I'm petrified of driving, but what about flying? It’s now cheaper and more reliable than taking the train to Manchester or Newcastle."

"Everyone has the right to say or do what they like within the law, but that doesn't change my conviction – which is considered as extreme as it is obvious to me – that anti-Israel Jews are worse than antisemitic: they are traitors. If their lives were at stake, and Israel was the one place in the world they might be safe, Israel's duty would be to take them in because they are Jews. But to me, now, whatever rituals they perform, they are useless Jews. Superfluous. In the enemy camp, working against all who believe "never again"."

"The America of my childhood was not a place where Jews had to brace themselves for constant invocations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where Jewish excellence in entertainment triggered public mockery laced with canards about Jewish control, as in Dave Chappelle's monologue. And, on the left, it was not a place where being pro-Israel was seen to be a position of "white supremacy" — a crime, in the new American progressive universe, deemed far worse than antisemitism."

"[From an article on Kanye West's admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.] It's hard to believe that this is all happening in the country of my childhood — a place where light antisemitism sometimes marred small Waspy towns like the one I grew up in, or circulated within certain communities, but didn’t dominate the ether. On the contrary. Crucially, there was a sense, an awareness, that Jews were an indispensable addition to American showbiz — and America was lucky to have them. The idea that celebrities, from comedy to music and sport (the NBA's Kyrie Irving recently promoted a terrifying book called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America) might weekly spew some new Goebbels-grade sentiment would have seemed dystopian."

"Anti-black racism rightly gets a lot of attention. But perhaps it's time to figure out where Jews fit into the picture because, as the Tuck report makes clear, our struggles are just as real as those facing other minorities."

"Everywhere in the ancient Hindu books we find the maxims of that pure and sound morality which is founded on the nature of man as a rational and social being…."

"In short, I consider morality like the sciences and arts, to be only slumbering not forgotten in India; and that to awaken the Hindus to a knowledge of the treasures in their own hands is the only thing wanting to set them fairly in the course of improvement with other nations."

"The Hindus claim the honour of having invented the method of teaching by apologues…"

"A stranger in India will not fail to be struck with the indiscriminate respect which the lower classes of Hindus pay to the objects worshipped by all other sects. I have seen them making their little offerings, and joining the processions at the Mussulman feasts of Hassan and Hossein, and as frequently appearing at the doors of the Romish Portuguese chapels, with presents of candles to burn before the saints, and flowers to adorn the shrines; in short, whatever is regarded as holy by others, they approach with reverence, so much are uncultivated men the creatures of imitation and habit."

"Were all other monuments swept away from the face of Hindustan, were all its inhabitants destroyed, and its name forgotten, the existence of the Sanskrit language would prove that it once contained a race who had reached a high degree of refinement, and who must have been blessed with many rare advantages before such a language could have been formed and polished. Amidst the wreck of nations where it flourished, and superior to the havoc of war and conquest, it remains a venerable monument of the splendour of other times, as the solid Pyramid in the deserts of Egypt.""

"Wander into any pub in the city and strike up a conversation. Offer to buy your companion a drink, order a Guinness and take it from there."

"Our missionaries are very apt to split upon this rock, and in order to place our religion in the brightest light, as if it wanted their feeble aid, they lay claim exclusively to all the sublime maxims of morality and tell those they wish to convert, that their own books contain nothing but abominations, the belief of which they must abandon in order to receive the purer doctrine of Christianity. Mistaken men! Mistaken men! Could they desire a better opening to their hopes than to find already established that morality which says, it is enjoined to man even at the moment of destruction to wish to benefit his foes, ‘as the sandal tree in the instant of its overthrow sheds perfume on the axe that fells it.’…"

"…perhaps I should be ashamed to own that I had so far strayed from good-nature and good-sense, as to forget, that whatever reproaches may be deserved by some of the Hindus for their moral practices the fundamental principles of morality itself are so firmly implanted in the soul of man that no vicious practice and no mistaken code can change their nature..."

"I'm the luckiest girl . . . If you were standing up at my eulogy, it's just the most extraordinary life"

"I'm very lucky to be a guest at Royal Lodge so I don't have to. I don’t cook, shan’t cook, won’t cook"

"I'm a very chameleon adapter to whatever situation I'm in"

"This was a world in which only the ignorant could be happy."

"Ignorance breeds fear. Tell people the truth. Trust them to keep their heads."

"I've been very open about how difficult it was when the tabloids criticised my weight and my choices and called me the "Duchess of Pork". I remember one headline when a newspaper had run a poll and claimed that 82 per cent of people would rather sleep with a goat than Fergie. Of course that undermines your self-confidence and your self-worth. You start to believe that the whole world does think you are fat and frumpy."

"An age of chivalry as outmoded as honour, as obsolete as truth."

"War meant a perpetual postponement of life, yet one did not cease to grow old."

"'She’s just a typical bourgeois reactionary.’ ‘You mean, her prejudices are different from yours.'"

"[On Diana, Princess of Wales] I loved her from the minute I met her when I was 14 to the minute she passed away."

"The Regency period is peculiarly Miss Heyer's own, and The Grand Sophy is one of her very best. No one is more adept at combining the amusing idiom of the time with an undated wit to make dialogue that crackles with life. No one creates characters so entirely without anachronisms yet so convincingly flesh and blood. There is nothing of the egad-forsooth style in her books, but the very essence of the swaggering, coaching, gaming set is on every page. If there is any justice in the writing world, which is sometimes questionable, Miss Heyer's public will continue to increase substantially."

"I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened."

"The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness."

"I don’t think I am green. It’s true I only know what I’ve read in books, but I’ve read a great many books."

"I like very few people nowadays; in fact, the number of persons whom I cordially dislike increases almost hourly."

"I daresay Freddy might not be a great hand at slaying dragons—but one has not the smallest need of a man who can kill dragons!"

"I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life."

"As soon as one promises not to do something, it becomes the one thing above all others that one most wishes to do."

"If somebody could write a book for people who never read they would make a fortune."

"The immediate consequences are obvious: a Labour government with a commanding majority but a demoralizing inbox, and an opposition that will spend the next few days asking what the hell went wrong, the next few months wondering what to do next, and the next few decades arguing over who was to blame. The only consolation for the Conservatives will be to conclude that this was not a defeat for their ideology so much as a punishment for their incompetence."

"After being raised Catholic, I became interested in New Atheism in the 2000s, because it was a countercultural phenomenon. Like pretty much everyone else, I would argue that my political beliefs are all carefully derived from first principles. But the ones that I choose to write about publicly are clearly influenced by my own self-image as an outsider and a contrarian. Being self-aware about that helps me remember that my fear of normiedom has to be kept in check, because the conventional wisdom is often right."

"When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl's work, it's always the nastiness that lingers. ... The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is "Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?" This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts."

"Dahl's novels share many of their flaws with the books of Ian Fleming, born eight years earlier and a survivor of the same vicious public-school system. The writers knew each other, from their mutual involvement in wartime espionage, and their estates pose the same problem: They are money machines, but the original works embarrass their current owners. Fleming's James Bond was a suave misogynist prone to slapping women and making disparaging remarks about "Chinamen." Today's audiences would recoil from that version of 007."

"With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn. Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida."

"[I]n the Netflix documentary the historian David Olusoga makes the important point that Britain tends to celebrate its role in abolishing the slave trade, with rather less focus on its participation in the slave trade. And I recognize a knee-jerk defensiveness in many of the British reactions to Harry and Meghan, including my own. Culture wars flourish best when two things are simultaneously true, and people must choose which one to emphasize. Does the British press sometimes treat the Royal Family appallingly, and do its white-dominated institutions perpetuate racism? Yes and yes. Do Harry and Meghan love rehashing their grievances, and seem unaware that they are wealthy far beyond anything their personal talents would normally merit? Also yes and yes."

"Another adjective often attached to Sturgeon is feminist. When the Conservative prime minister Theresa May visited Scotland in 2016, Sturgeon tweeted a photograph of the two women shaking hands, with the words "Politics aside—I hope girls everywhere look at this photograph and believe nothing should be off limits for them." The majority of Sturgeon’s cabinet is female, as is her chief of staff. She is adored by a generation of young female activists: the SNP store once sold EAT, SLEEP, NICOLA, REPEAT T-shirts."

"Sturgeon's second challenge comes from debates over the rights of transgender women—an issue that is also causing disquiet and dissent among progressives across the world, including in the United States. In 2019, she received an open letter from women in her own party who claimed they were unable to discuss their rights without being called transphobic bigots. The other side accuses her of not doing enough to crack down on all those transphobic bigots. (In January, Sturgeon posted an unscripted video on Twitter, begging young activists who "consider at this stage the SNP not to be a safe, tolerant, or welcoming place for trans people" to stick with her party.)"

"Given all the effort feminists have invested in making language more equitable, you might expect that they would welcome use of the term pregnant people. But some, including me, are concerned that it obscures the social dynamics at work in laws surrounding contraception, abortion, and maternal health. The argument for the second wave’s language changes was that women fought fires in the exact same way as men, so one word should cover both sexes. That’s a different decision from whether we should keep gendered language to reflect heavily gendered experiences."

"Those two words—values and competence—are key to Starmer's plan to remake Labour. Britain's Jewish community is small—0.5 percent of the population—but the issue of anti-Semitism cut through more broadly in the general election. To many Jewish voters, the party’s failure to expel anti-Semitic conspiracists and cranks has been personally painful, even frightening. To the wider electorate, it sent out the message that Corbyn was either complicit or incompetent. Neither is an attractive proposition when choosing a prime minister."

"[N]othing about that Senate circus was fair on Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford. It was pure theatre. The FBI "investigation" which followed it was a sham. It could not have been clearer that the Republicans wanted to keep the allegations unresolved, and use them as a wedge issue: hasn’t the pendulum swung too far? Where’s the evidence? It’s his word against hers! Perhaps they suspect that a proper investigation would produce evidence that would have disqualified Kavanaugh, or perhaps they believe him to be innocent, but preferred a quick confirmation to a slow exoneration. Either way, their cynicism is demoralising. The vagueness of #MeToo has helped victims come out (it’s easier to say "me too" than the more stark "I was raped" or "this man harassed me"). The phrase has helped the public discussion to stay "polite", avoiding too much talk of brutality and bodily fluids. But that vagueness is also a drawback, smudging together mere thoughtless entitlement with violence and coercion."

"It is still shocking to me that Miller could be so little versed in feminism that she could sign off a report advising a change to the Equality Act, replacing “gender reassignment” with “gender identity” as a protected characteristic, without realising the profound public policy implications of that change. At a stroke, she advised changing our concept of gender from something that is partially socially constructed – how you are treated – to entirely a matter of internal essence. She entered the realm of metaphysics, asserting that everyone has a gender identity, something which no instrument can measure. That isn’t the kind of thing you can casually toss out in paragraph 4.108 and expect everyone to nod through, unless you have no idea what you’re proposing."

"Perhaps a comparison will help. The same progressives who push for pregnant people have no problem saying “Black Lives Matter”—and in fact decry the right-wing rejoinder that "all lives matter." Yet, hopefully, all lives do matter—and about half of the people shot by U.S. police are white. So why insist on Black? Because the phrase is designed to highlight police racism, as well as the disproportionate killing of Black men in particular. Making the slogan more "inclusive" also makes it useless for political campaigning. Pregnant people does the same. The famous slogan commonly attributed to the second-wave activist Florynce Kennedy—"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament"—would be totally defanged if it were made gender-neutral. And if we cannot talk about, say, the Texas abortion law in the context of patriarchal control of women's bodies, then framing the feminist case against such laws becomes harder. No more "men making laws about women." Instead we get: "Some people who are in charge of policy want to restrict the rights of some other people. We oppose that because people’s rights are human rights!""

"This is a tragic story, from start to finish. The imperial over-reach of a handful of trans activists, in trying to rewrite widely accepted ideas about gender by stealth, has done nothing to improve the lives of trans people. The time wasted by Stonewall and other organisations, which have spent more than a year chasing a legal change that wasn’t even a priority for those interviewed by the inquiry."

"That this play is at the Globe, the home of Shakespeare, only underscores that it is not in the Shakespearean tradition. The great English playwright is still revered today because he drove the possibilities of drama forward, creating characters with psychological depth and ambiguity. I, Joan is part of an older tradition, the medieval morality play. These pitted virtues and vices against one another for the soul of the protagonist: Greed and Sloth raged against Chastity and Patience. In I, Joan, that conflict has given way to one between Cisnormativity and Authenticity. I, Joans supporting characters exist not as people but as conduits for the moral lesson being delivered to the audience."

"Transgender people face discrimination at work, casual abuse in the street and long waits for NHS care. None of those problems will be addressed by the government’s plan to change gender reassignment to a matter of simple declaration."