Women Authors From England

"[B]oth the previous two prime ministers – Truss and Boris Johnson – are at this game. We live in an era where people who have got all the way to the highest office in the land now hilariously claim structural discrimination against the fact that, after varying amounts of time, they just weren't good enough. When both of these chancers left office, they had not simply passed their best-before date – they had sailed beyond the use-by date and moved formally into the realms of biohazard. Yet instead of bucking the f up and accepting this, they have turned into the political equivalent of "incels" – involuntarily rejected by the people who determine whether or not you get to be prime minister, and bleating about it in self-reflection-free style on every available forum."

"Courtesy of the Daily Mail, Johnson has just accepted the position of "newspaper columnist", an extremely silly job, which in large part involves implying you'd do it better if only they'd give you a turn running the country. As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, surely we have tested the central premise of that one to destruction."

"For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school."

"And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn't have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. ... Dear 2008 Marina: you think you’re being clever but you’re being horribly obtuse. Get your head out of your arse. It doesn't matter whether or not they heard it, it’s still hideous and they have every right to think it’s absolutely unacceptable for the BBC to have aired it."

"I appreciate that both of these men – or, more accurately, devoted fans of both of these men – will argue that these are not stylistic tricks; rather, these men have worn these items for decades because they're as true to their values as they are to their clothes. But that is precisely the point: their clothes have communicated this, and these men undoubtedly know that. After all, being anti-fashion is as much a style statement as being on trend. Now, personally, some of us think that [[Jeremy Corbyn|[Jeremy] Corbyn]] could consider updating his ideas as much as his wardrobe, but I know how much criticism of St Jeremy upsets some sensitive readers, so let's not go there so soon after such a nice long weekend. So the style for leftwing politicians now (and, indeed, always) is to look as if you don’t care about your look while very much cultivating a look."

"I suppose I should be pleased to hear someone tell me how adorable they think Jewish people are and how cute they find Yiddish phrases, what with rising antisemitic attacks and what have you. But proving that you really can't please a Jew (it's part of our innate Jewness – chicken soup, good at jokes and irritating belligerence, oy vey!), I'm not. Instead, it makes me want to throw dreidels at the person's head. (Jews and their toys! Adorable!) There is something about someone fetishising me as part of a homogenous mass of their own reductive fashioning that makes me come over a bit broigus. (Look it up, philosemites – you love this stuff!). So I have found it to be a good rule of thumb that anyone who identifies as a philosemite is to be treated with the same amused contempt as anyone who says they love "the African people". Julie Burchill has probably been the most egregious example in Britain for some time, writing newspaper columns with her customary delicacy about her abject admiration of “the Jewish people”. (Are we chosen? Are we intelligent? Are we stoical? Why, I think we are.)"

"Nobody ever asks me what it felt like. They never ask what it was like to spend three of my teenage years in secure psychiatric units for severe anorexia nervosa; how it felt to be so undernourished I could hardly walk; how it feels now to be able to picture the doctors' and nurses' faces more clearly than I can those of my late grandparents; how it feels to have spent my formative years with young women who are now, in so many cases, dead; how this experience changed my personality for ever. No, no one asks that. Instead they ask why: "Why were you anorexic? Why?""

"This kumbaya approach is an increasingly popular one. Why can't we ladies all just get along? Hakuna matata! Yet no one is asking why more women than men are raising objections here. Perhaps people think this is just what women are like: uniquely catty. Lifelong feminists, especially older ones, who express any reservations about eliding the experiences of trans and cis women are dismissed as bigoted ol' bitches – and maybe some are. But there are real ethical issues here, and they overwhelmingly affect women. Sport is one obvious example. Male-born bodies have had different testosterone levels and muscle distribution from female ones. No one knows what the solution is but pretending there isn't a difference is ridiculous. Then there are prisons. It's easy to cheer on Chelsea Manning, but should anyone with a history of crimes against women and girls really be in a female prison?"

"Jews are not Israel (something liberal Jews have been saying for years) but nobody – not a London theatre, not even Steven Spielberg – has the right to tell them what to think about it, or to ask them to prove their good Jewish credentials by either supporting or condemning it. Watch yourself, Europe. Some of your roots are showing."

"Intriguingly, some of the most passionate arguments I've had about this have not been with trans people, but with liberal men. I surely speak for all of us ladies when I say I love nothing more than when a man explains to me, at some length, what a woman now is. I only have 40 years' experience but, as we all know, experience is old hat now. There is something, shall we say, revealing about the way these "woke bros" take such glee in calling women (older ones, especially) who talk about their rights and bodies "terfs" – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – and insist they shut up or risk ostracism. Women have had to fight so hard for a place at the table, for the right to define themselves, for spaces where they feel safe. Any man who sneers at them now for worrying about the shifting paradigms, offering only meaningless platitudes or accusations of bigotry, is showing his male privilege. There is understandable concern about being on the wrong side of history. But I'll tell you what has never put anyone on the right side of history: shouting women down."

"Few things drive the British press quite so demented as the thought of a pregnant woman with a choice."

"And he works with Johann Hari, who you might recall was called out for plagiarising and anonymously trashing fellow journalists on Wikipedia. While one is loth to judge a man by the company he keeps, one can judge a man by his lack of judgment."

"First, it is important to remember we are dealing with interactions on social media here, a medium that is to "calm" and "thoughtfulness" what the Daily Mail is to reasoned political debate."

"And speaking of wealthy, scary people, who should arrive but [[w:Harvey Weinstein|[Harvey] Weinstein]] himself. "Mr Weinstein, Hadley Freeman from the Guardian. What would you say are the essential ingredients of a good party?" I cry out like a drowning woman. Weinstein walks over to me and – slightly menacingly, one might say – takes my elbow. "Hadley," he says, his voice heavy with condescension, "enjoy yourself." The two men next to him laugh obediently. I decide to follow big Harvey's instructions. And so, with a final glimpse at the dancefloor, where Jessie J is dancing with one friend to Prince's Kiss, I take my leave and go home."

"It was, if memory serves, the Louis Vuitton fashion show and I was there in my very professional capacity as a fashion writer for The Guardian newspaper. But someone caught my eye who made me feel a little less than professionally excited. I grabbed my notebook and stepped down from my third-row seat to the front row. "Um, Kanye West?" "Yes?" he said, looking up at me through his sunglasses. "Could you sign an autograph for me? It’s for my niece," I said, handing him my notebook. "Sure — what’s her name?" "Uh, Hadley — that’s H, A, D, L ..." The US Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who was sitting next to West, looked up and raised a sarcastic eyebrow."

"Taran-tara! A book is being published this month, and it has already attracted the kind of publicity that would make a JK Rowling novel look unheralded. Admittedly, the author is very prolific, having written more than 80 books, which have sold more than 10 million copies. And yet you’ve never heard of him, which is precisely why he’s getting so much attention. That goes against the grain not just of the modern publishing industry, where only writers who already get media coverage get more media coverage, but of this particular author's entire career. Because this book, you see, is called Confessions of a Ghostwriter, and it was written by a chap called Andrew Crofts, who has built a career on writing books for people more famous than himself."

"This week George Galloway took to his video blog, the apparently unironically named Good Night with George Galloway, to defend Assange."

"What a strange, Alice-through-the-looking-glass time it is to be a liberal American Jew in Britain. When I was growing up in New York, it was a given that one supported Israel. Israel, like America, was a country made from desperate immigrants. It was where my great-grandmother lived after seeing two of her sons go to the concentration camps, and where the memorial for my great-uncle Jakob, who was murdered in Auschwitz, was erected. Israel was the Holocaust's happy ending, and you only have to look at Hollywood to know how much America loves simple happy endings. Israel = good, Israel’s enemies = evil antisemites. But to be honest, I always resented this. I dislike being told what to think, or people making lazy assumptions about where my loyalties should lie."

"It was odd coming to Poland just months after President Duda signed a law making it illegal to suggest the country was in any way complicit with the Holocaust, despite its long history of antisemitism and survivors’ testimonies about Poles handing Jews over to the Nazis. At Auschwitz, the signs stress German responsibility and Polish victimhood. There is even a gift shop, in case a trip to Auschwitz should make you desirous of buying some "I heart Poland" merchandise. My father and I then visited his mother's home town, 18km away. Around the corner from the house in which she grew up was fresh graffiti: "Anty Jude." Not even having Auschwitz down the road made that person rethink their antisemitism."

"Contrary to how it's often depicted in the press, there is nothing of the "cheats option" to a c-section, unless you count being sliced in half as a walk in the park."

"I don't really care for the phrase "sowing division" as far as [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]] is concerned. "Sowing" implies a sort of precision to the planting, when in fact Galloway just sprays division around like some porphyric roué who can't be bothered to find the urinal."

"The rapturous standing ovation at the end of Liz Truss’s conference speech looked straight out of a future Netflix documentary from the cults strand. Outside the sect’s meeting hall, the party is polling an average of 25 (TWENTY-FIVE) points behind Labour. Inside, the people were clapping like they’d just heard a really charismatic argument about why it’s important to marry teenage girls, shun dissenting family members, and build gun turrets round their compound. Truss’s government is now too weak to implement its maddest plans and too ideological to implement its most sensible. Last night it emerged that the government has blocked a public information campaign to help people save money on energy – and, by extension, to conserve usage in the face of suggestions that rolling blackouts could be in the post for this winter. Apparently Truss regarded it as too nannying, despite it having been drawn up by her own business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg (a 53-year-old who admittedly still has a nanny). One cabinet minister reportedly said "the public is smarter than you think". Unfortunately, Liz Truss isn’t. If we do reach the blackout scenario, the failure to plan or use foresight will be blamed on Vladimir Putin."

"I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing."

"As chief interviewer for The Sunday Times, it is my job to be the pitcher. What I've learnt from interviewing people for a living is that the quality of any conversation is determined not by what someone thinks they have to say, but by what someone else asks them. In my experience, even the dreariest interviewee will eventually come out with something interesting. My job is to try to find it. Take a look around the room at any party and you will see women — heads cocked, expressions attentive — trying their best to find it too. Only they're not getting paid. Yet however tiresome the gender question gap is for women, it is a big problem for men, for it must explain why so many struggle to make meaningful male friendships. A rewarding conversation requires at least one party to be curious about the other. If neither asks a single question, both are doomed to bore each other."

"Before we go any further, I'm warned that any criticism of Assange will land me in the doghouse with those somehow still able to take him 100% seriously, and may even cause a section of commentators to suspect I am part of some Guardian plot against him. The reality is a thousand times less intriguing, alas, and may even land me in the doghouse with the Guardian."

"And so to Sweden, a country Assange regarded as so perilously likely to FedEx him to the US that he travelled there frequently until he was accused of rape in it."

"You know, almost every time I've ever written about Richard Branson over the years, he or one of his lackeys has written in to the Guardian to whine about it, and often got the letter printed. This time, I'm actively begging him to get in touch. Come on, Richard – write in and tell us why you didn't bother Googling why your friend with the best lawyers out there still got an 18-month prison sentence, and had, at the time of that email, settled many widely reported civil lawsuits brought against him by victims? I'll save you a space on the letters page."

"An eating disorder is a mental illness. It is characterised by the sufferer's belief that they are too fat, that to survive on 500 calories a day is the norm, that doctors are trying to make them fat, that weighing more than seven stone is obese and unacceptable. So far, so paranoid. Yet the current culture of skinniness legitimises the anorexic's beliefs. That is where the danger lies. Once a person becomes severely anorexic, they are usually too locked into their own little world to care if Jennifer Aniston is now a size six, or to read about Jodie Kidd's protruding hip bones. But when they try to recover, it is very difficult to shake off these old beliefs when every other magazine cover seems to validate them."

"Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially."

"Arguments about gender are now so vicious that most high-profile people would rather eat their hair than speak out. But sport, it turns out, is a more clear-cut issue to some than, say, prisons – where various groups have argued over whether trans women should be housed with female inmates. The current ideology is that gender identity is at least as important, if not more so, than biological sex. That is why an LGBT sports group like Athlete Ally can dismiss Navratilova's arguments about male skeletal advantages with a simple "trans women are women". The International Olympic Committee allows trans women to compete if they have been reducing their testosterone for 12 months; but, increasingly, female athletes are saying that testosterone is not the only advantage. Boys start growing bigger bones, muscles and greater heart capacity from puberty, and no gender switch will undo that. One can firmly defend a person's right to live in the gender identity of their choosing yet also look at photos of trans women athletes such as Gabrielle Ludwig, Natalie van Gogh and [[w:Rachel McKinnon|[Rachel] McKinnon]] standing alongside their strikingly smaller female team-mates, and think Navratilova’s arguments are worth investigating instead of dismissing with cries of bigotry."

"Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go. They were total scumbags, but it's over. O-V-A-H."

"At the heart of my mother's death, it turns out, there had been a big secret after all. She had wanted very much to die at home. She had feared the final ravages of disease which might frighten her children and demean her dignity. So she had obtained a pill that would kill her. The night she died had been planned in advance; she chose her moment, and took her own life. It meant she knew she was saying goodbye when we said good night for the last time. Her closest friends had been told as well. While the four of us slept, the terrible drama of their final goodbyes was being played out in her bedroom, and when we woke the next day, thinking fate had taken its course, we were quite wrong. Our father had known he would be breaking the news all along. Did it matter? At first I wasn't sure. Our mother's belief in a person's right to control the moment of their death was well known, for she had taken part in a World In Action documentary six months before her death, and been a powerful advocate. But I'd taken her argument for hypothesis, never dreaming she had found the means to make it real. My mother had decided we must not be told."

"The relationship between Britain and America, from Britain's perspective, has always reminded me of the one between Frasier Crane and his brother Niles: there's the big, brassy, embarrassing, famous and attention-seeking brother who hogs the spotlight, and then there's the smaller, sharper, more self-aware and overly self-conscious brother who is both scornful of his sibling's shallow fame but also faintly jealous of it and hides the latter beneath snarky jibes. Of course I get it: having lived in America and Britain I can see all too well how America's cheerful, unabashed tendencies towards arrogance, superficiality and shameless ambition grate against Britain's preference for self-effacement, awkwardness and grim failure. What I don't get is why folk in Britain bother getting wound up about it. Any hint of an American tradition coming to Britain – high-school proms, Daily Show-a-like nightly talkshow, will.i.am – and Radio 4 programmes and newspaper articles sprout up most self-righteously debating whether America is "taking over British culture". Come on, Britain, you're better than this. Make like Niles and take out your handkerchief, wipe away the germs and walk on past. It'll probably go away soon."

"By instinct, I like the French revolutionary tradition commanding absolute secularism in schools and state institutions. But French secularism tends to cause less social harmony, not more, used as an easy pretext for far-right anti-Muslim attacks. Humanists defend people's right to private beliefs and religious practices, as long as they impose on no one else."

"[On the Bruges Group, informally a thinktank for the Conservatives] They spread Europhobia through their party until all candidates had to test positive for Brexit."

"I think of two deaths. The last stages of my mother’s liver and bowel cancer were dreadful: don’t imagine morphine is a gentle floating away – it detaches the mind, but not always the pain, while blocking the gut until an undignified death, obsessed by constipation. By the time her state was bad enough to long for death, it was far too late for her plea to go to Dignitas in Switzerland: those who take that grim and expensive path to a desolate death room need to go early, long before life becomes insufferable. Some people might never have reached that point, but fear accelerates their departure. My mother, despite good palliative care, begged her GP to help her die. It might have been done once upon a time, he said, but since Harold Shipman’s multiple murders of elderly patients, every ampoule is counted, making it far too dangerous for a doctor to do anything of the kind. "Oh, where’s Dr Shipman when you want him!" she said to him, with what was left of her laugh. So she suffered on needlessly to the bitter end, and we suffered with her helplessly."

"This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester's civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them. The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on "no-fault" section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been."

"[Remembering life events in 1964 or 1965] But as he was about to go to Oxford, I was appalled to find I was pregnant and even more appalled at his anti-abortion mother pressing us to marry. She suggested we would live in an Oxford flat, where I would bring up the baby while he studied: the end of my own future worried her not at all. We paid a visit to his newly married sister, who was living in Oxford’s Summertown, up the road from my great-aunts. I was pleased to see her, this lively, funny and magnetic character. But she was living, as far as I could see, the life their mother expected me to live, married and cooped up in an Oxford flat with a baby. Though she was herself a student, wifedom and life with a baby looked to me like a brutal curtailment of studenthood, locked in at home. There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn't find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy. I shuddered at the prospect of this motherly existence, threatening an end to my life before it had even begun. Afterwards, as we both contemplated this scene, looking at his sister and at the vision of our future stretching out ahead of us, he broke off with me. [Toynbee had a then illegal abortion.]"

"That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicrously changed name of Boris: he looks much the same."

"Her class identity has clearly caused her much confusion and soul-searching. She is particularly acute on the uncomfortable space that the radical middle and upper-middle classes have always occupied in our culture. The charge of hypocrisy is so easily made against affluent campaigners and reformers who must suffer "the cognitive dissonance of failing to live up to the beliefs we profess." It’s a fate, Toynbee notes with irritation, that no smug wealthy Conservative ever has to endure."

"As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked."

"Dominic Cummings was brought in by Johnson to swing a wrecking ball at Whitehall, local councils, the BBC and anything that smelled of good government. No surprise that those who don't believe in the state have made the worst possible fist of running it in a crisis. Brexit embodied their mindset: break away, break things and disrupt."

"[A reopening of a water fountain in London, Wimbledon] I was there because the fountain was erected in 1868 in memory of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Toynbee, otologist and ear-syringer to Queen Victoria: he died young in his laboratory experimenting on himself with chloroform for tinnitus. He was a radical local campaigner who fought to save Wimbledon Common from the rapacious Earl Spencer's attempt to privatise and enclose it. He set up the Wimbledon Village Club, a working men's institute for edification, entertainment, refreshments and a library, in much community use now. Family history records that his rigorous selflessness included dragging his nine children across Wimbledon Common on Christmas Day to make them donate their Christmas dinner to a Travellers' encampment. The plaque on the fountain says that working men of Wimbledon and those "interested in the public good" paid for this memorial."

"The trouble with the monarchy is not that it is too powerful but that it is utterly useless. So much is spent on ceremonial trappings to disguise its inner nothingness."

"The Labour question is always the same – how far can you go and still bring enough voters with you? As Labour’s divide deepens, those of us not supporting Corbyn have been assailed as "neoliberal", "siding with the elite", "betraying the poor", "hypocrite" and worse. Like many Labour people, free to dream I’d go further than Corbyn: I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit, make the Queen be Elizabeth the Last, abolish faith schools, private schools and inheritance, tax millionaires at 70%: add your wishlist here. I don’t know how far you can go – but you have to win power to get anywhere at all. Once in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further than you dare tread in opposition."

"High rolling countries run other risks when the exchequer itself gets addicted to the revenues. The Australian government now draws over 10% of its income from gambling: however much destruction it causes to families, the government would fear action that cut gambling habits. The UK Treasury gets only £1.4bn from gambling: on household losses of £9.7bn, that sounds as if the industry is escaping its fair UK dues."

"It is not my practice to engage in local political activity on the grounds that I have quite enough of that sort of thing without doing it in the evenings or at weekends. My wife, Ms Polly Toynbee, who is a member of the SDP's National Steering Committee, intends to put up for the Lambeth Borough Council. That is her affair and I shall go canvassing on her behalf if weather permits. I expect, in the fulness of time, to become the Denis Thatcher of the SDP."

"Here comes the coronation in a few weeks, not much changed since I was waving at the last one, pleading in vain for a Dinky Toy gold coach."

"No-one is suggesting banning gambling or casinos, any more than I would ban pornography, or drugs or all manner of things that might do people harm. But there is an important social difference between freedom to do what adults please if they deliberately seek out those things from regulated places - and aggressively thrusting them at everyone in everyday life."

"Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake. How it oozes over the planet, sweet, sickly, homogenous, full of 'E' numbers, stabilisers and monosodium glutamate, tasting the same from Samoa to Siberia to Somalia. A traveller across the desert wastes of the Sahara arrives at last at Timbuktu, where the first denizen he meets is wearing a Texaco baseball cap. Pilgrims to the Himalayas in search of the ultimate wilderness in the furthest kingdom find Everest strewn with rubbish, tins, plastic bags, Coca-Cola bottles and all the remnants of the modern global picnicker. Explorers of the Arctic complain that empty plastic bottles of washing-up liquid are embedded in the ice. Global culture and its detritus wash up everywhere, nothing sacred, nothing wild, nothing authentic, original or primitive any more. These modern travellers' tales tell of cultural vandalism, Western Goths contaminating ancient civilisations and traditions untouched for centuries. If the West were to set out on a mission of global imperialism deliberately planned we would surely choose better cultural ambassadors. It is not pages from Shakespeare or scores of Mozart that litter steppe and savannah but some marketing man's logo from last year's useless, meretricious product, or a snatch of that maddening theme tune from Titanic. Was ever an empire so monstrously self-assured and ambitious? Western cultural imperialism reaches right into the hearts and souls, the sexual behaviour, the spirit, religion, politics and the nationhood of the entire world. It happens haphazardly with no master plan or empire-building blueprint, but with a vague and casual insouciance that drives its detractors to despair. So when we consider the globalisation of culture most of us bring to the subject a jumble of deep-seated alarms - moral, intellectual, political, spiritual, artistic and nationalistic, melting into a great pot of 'globalisation panic'. It causes deep pessimism about the cultural future of a world turning homogeneously horrible."