Women Journalists From England

"The conventional attitude is that, if World War Three arose, it would be by accident. But we should entertain the possibility that autocratic leaders – tortured by the prospect of death in the event of their fall from power – will be willing to pursue survival strategies that, while irrational to us, appear deeply rational to them."

"You've got to hand it to Liz Truss. It is customary for prime ministers to spend their retirement wasting into tragic figures."

"[[Nigel Farage|[Nigel] Farage]] has been mocked for espousing unpopular views. But an insurgent, mildly reckless party may be needed to break the stalemate. Reform may even be groping towards an innovative way of doing politics, which might be dubbed "paradoxical populism". The challenges of the day require charismatic leaders who can bank voter goodwill from populist achievements, such as bringing down immigration, in order to drive through less attractive but necessary projects, such as administering tough medicine to the economy or fixing healthcare."

"There’s something slightly different about Truss. Perhaps because she wasn't in office long enough to go mad, there has been no period of roving in the existential wilderness."

"There is no point mincing words: Thatcherism and Reaganomics have been demolished by the very animal spirits of the free markets that, some 40 years ago, they unleashed in good faith. History has come full circle, with neoliberalism, like the mythical monster Ouroboros, devouring its own tail."

"It is time for the Leave camp to start saying the unsayable: the Tories have made such a hash of Brexit that the project is probably now unsalvageable."

"The mind boggles when it comes to Sadiq Khan. In many ways, he is a faceless phantom – a fascinatingly bland Labour apparatchik incapable of an original thought or phrase. And yet somehow he has managed to build himself into the consummate dictator-bureaucrat, London's own answer to Leonid Brezhnev or Raul Castro."

"Indeed, if Boris Johnson does the only thing he can feasibly do and resign, the big risk is that the Conservatives will tip back into civil war."

"[H]e is a genuinely disturbing political figure, spinning his own universe of deception out of London’s dystopian hellscape."

"This is why with a no-deal Brexit now "illegal" we are heading for a second referendum, and the Tory Party's obliteration. The problem with brilliant men in politics is that too often their brains go to their heads."

"Trump looks set to prove a pivotal figure. His unimpeded energy, and wars against the legal-industrial complex offer a glimpse of a style of leadership that is willing to take on the biases and inefficiencies of the system."

"Trump embodies unapologetic honesty."

"Trump's leadership style also consternates my fellow millennials, who feel more comfortable with elegant underachievers than graceless bulldozers who "get the job done"."

"Leaver MPs grossly overestimate their opponents. Their centrist colleagues' masterplan for saving the Tories is little more than "suicide on autopilot" by an obsolete ruling class."

"[P]erhaps Trump’s most striking "gangster" characteristic – and the one that has won him so many fans – is his bloody-minded focus. The reason we are mesmerised by the Hollywood gangster character – why we both fear him and deep down want to be him – is that he knows what he wants, and he goes out and gets it, not giving a damn about whatever or whoever stands in his way."

"Why haven't the ERG drilled into results from the recent local elections, which reveal Tories are haemorrhaging in “safe” areas from Essex to Somerset? The Brexiteers should use this evidence as a basis for arguing that it's no-deal or bust. Or they should do us all a favour, and defect to the Brexit Party."

"Don't take on a black kid from northern England and then make them do gang stories all the time [...] When I came back from maternity leave, my first 22 stories were all mother and baby stories."

"Unfortunately, we're in an era where all the guys who don't like journalists are winning the battle of convincing the general public that all journalists are one up from snakes – or actually the snakes – instead of the defenders of truth, and it really doesn't help when you have people masquerading as journalists."

"The truly radical sub-text, however, is that a heroine can be politically motivated, a good dancer, attractive to the opposite sex, and fat all at the same time."

""The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," said Verbal Kint (paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire) in The Usual Suspects. This might have been true back in Kint's heyday, but nowadays it's depressingly obvious that devils do indeed exist, clad in the trappings of politics, religion or super-wealth as they sow conflict, contagion, oppression and conspiracy theories throughout the world."

"She's less one of the inner echelon of elder statesmen issuing judgement, and more your incredibly well-viewed friend who particularly loves genre movies, but also beer and cats."

"[Frail patients] went on to Covid wards, which was where I tended to work. Sometimes, six or eight patients on a ward would die in one day. The hideous, industrial scale of death after death after death – it was utterly horrific. And I say that as someone who is very used to death and dying."

"[Clarke was] caring for patients who are destined from the moment they come into hospital to never even see a human face again [...] Every face they see is masked."

"I arrive at work to find the atmosphere mutinous. The nurses in my hospital – as in every other – are exhausted, demoralised and often close to quitting. They take on gruelling extra shifts to make ends meet. They know they could earn more in the local supermarket. I look at my colleagues’ faces – so decent, so weary – and think: what a fatuous own goal, what vindictive idiocy. Who in their right mind would take nurses to court rather than persisting with diplomacy?"

"[T]he ABC acronym used in traumas all over the world today arose from a particular light aircraft crash on a Nebraska prairie in the 1970s. James Styner, the American trauma surgeon who happened to be flying the plane, was horrified by the chaos, incompetence and dithering that nearly cost his four young children their lives in a tiny rural hospital. The acronym he developed is based on the principle that when someone is critically injured, time is of the essence. Airway, Breathing and Circulation problems must be fixed in that order, before moving on to the next thing, because they are most likely to kill the patient fastest. The genius of the acronym lies in its simplicity. It gives doctors, nurses and paramedics a scaffold to cling on to amid the shock and disarray of a major disaster, providing emergency treatment one logical step at a time."

"With NHS staff being forced to witness our patients dying in corridors, in cupboards, on floors and in stranded ambulances, we can only thank our lucky stars that the country's second most powerful politician is the man who last year published Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS."

"[From a family of male doctors and female nurses, Clarke at first did not want to become a doctor] I worried that my main reason would be because I hero-worshipped my dad, wanted to make him proud. [As a journalist, Clarke] had massive impostor syndrome, always felt like I was faking it, trying to act tough."

"If [[w:Sally Davies (doctor)|[Sally] Davies]] really wants to bolster rock-bottom morale among juniors, she could publicly lobby the government to address the gaps that cripple every junior doctor rota. She could argue for proper hospital rest facilities so that never again does a junior doctor kill themselves while driving home from a night shift, having fallen asleep at the wheel. She could demand a public inquiry into the recent spate of junior doctor suicides, because no one’s conditions of work should ever make them feel suicidal, least of all those who save lives for a living. She could, in short, campaign for meaningful action, not a conveniently cost-neutral name change."

"The morning after it happens, it is hard to believe the sun still shines. I am standing in the kitchen, staring out across fields of frost, when a wren darts and whirs through the hedge in front of me. Dad, in a flash, is there too. "Look, Rachel! A wren!" His heart, like mine, never failed to lift at this smallest and most jaunty of birds. But, the night before, cancer finally claimed my dad. The wrens will keep whirring, but he has gone."

"This week, in response to the series, NHS England linked staff to a range of support services in a tweet [which follows]. The only problem? The dedicated NHS staff mental health and wellbeing hubs to which the tweet directed staff had their funding cut in early 2023. Almost half have since closed. I suppose they were judged too costly to maintain for NHS staff who were so evidently, from the outset, expendable."

"Another memorable meeting happened in Gateshead, as I sat on a rock by a lake, interviewing a man who had a history of believing and spreading online conspiracies. Despite the freezing weather, he insisted on wearing sunglasses to protect himself from the 5G rays that he believed caused the pandemic. Having challenged him under the watchful eye of his entourage, who filmed my every move, he finished by telling me I was a good kid who shouldn’t get caught up in the genocide. Talking in real life had started to erode the barriers between us — and exposed the stark distrust he felt towards everyone. He called me a few weeks ago and, in between telling me I would be tried for war crimes, had the courtesy to ask how I was and wish me a nice day. His inability to question and see the flaws in the conspiracy theories he promotes was unnerving. But conspiracy theories are his way of making sense of what’s going on around him. It’s his way, I think, of regaining control."

"There are huge misconceptions about the kinds of people who believe conspiracy theories. This image of people as stupid and crazy is not the case. I often find people are very switched on, hyper-curious and engaged and deeply distrustful. Often they’ve been really let down by people in authority or power and then turn to social media that starts to play on that distrust."

"[Describing the sofa she was sharing with her interviewer] I might love the cream sofa, you might hate the cream sofa, but we agree there's a cream sofa and we're sitting on it. If you don't agree there's a cream sofa, it's really hard to have a conversation."

"It's really normal to really hate me."

"When I found that out, I was quite relieved. [...] To have someone be, like, "Oh, actually, you do receive this phenomenal level of abuse," it makes you think, "Oh yeah, OK, I’m not going mad"."

"Spring is an extremely energetic, personable young woman. In a screwball comedy about a newsroom, she would be the one described as a dynamo. She is screen-ready – her earrings match her necklace, which matches her trousers, which match her shoes – but seems completely without vanity, the way athletes do. All that emanates from her is drive, curiosity and focus, and the zeal of authentic public-spiritedness. In your crankiest, most contrarian mood, you would still find it impossible to dislike her; it would be like trying to dislike the Lionesses."

"[A] film-version of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue ... for all its cleverness, is not a good film."

"Hitchcock had an artificial story and an artificial society to deal with here, but his treatment of them is not that of a director who matches artificiality of substance with artificiality of form, but of a man who has in himself so little reaction to flesh-and-blood truth that he is almost incapable of knowing the living from the dead. Hitchcock's blindness to the things that people do in expression of their real emotions is not a mannerism but a fact. In his work he thinks, and cannot feel. No director in England, and very few in America, can tell a screen story as cleverly as he—can narrate so subtly and simply to the eye, without a word written, using all the tricks of the camera and all the loquacity of silent things to carry his audience from point to point in perfect understanding and ease. But he will have to learn to know men as well as he knows the camera or, not knowing men, to turn his talents from the intimate to the impersonal kinema before he can become one of the great directors of the screen."

"If Mr. Hitchcock would rid himself of the delusion that it is enough for an artist to give perfect expression of any subject—the feelings of a cat sitting on a garbage can, the smell of over-ripe bananas in a broken basket on a dusty street—he would become a film producer of considerable merit in the world. He has originality. He has a fine economy of detail. He has made himself independent of words with a strongly developed pictorial sense. Some day he may surprise us all, and himself among the number, by making a picture that is as good in its conception as in its execution. And when Hitchcock sets to work on real film material, real artist's material, there will not be more than half a dozen producers in the world who will be able to beat him. There are none in England now."

"The Lodger was the best film made in England up to the end of last year. It had power, point, and an entirely new angle, that, is to say, in' an English studio—of visual expression. Downhill carries out every promise of its predecessor without being at all a good film."

"Hitchcock gets jubilantly to work on this very raw stuff, expressing with clever conjunction of shots, with superimposition, double exposure, dissolves, the moving camera, and all his bag of technical tricks, the feelings of loneliness, bitterness, and nausea which his characters might be expected to enjoy; he even tries to give the thing symbolic weight by sending his hero to perdition down the moving staircase of a tube station and the descending shaft of a mansion flat lift. I have never seen such an interesting, production of rubbish nor a clever film which deserved quite so little praise."

"I have spent the afternoon arguing with my old friend Alfred Hitchcock. Because we are old friends it was a long argument. And we did not, oddly enough, argue about his new picture, which I review, with some asperity, below. I did not like Sabotage, and Hitch," who never tries to persuade the Press against their conscience, didn't attempt to suggest that I should like it. But it is a long-standing custom between us that we should meet and eat and talk after every Hitchcock first-night."

"It is one of the rarer necessities of film criticism that one has to write, occasionally, about films. This is a necessity which I find, as the years go on, my colleagues and I evade as much as possible. Those of us whose persuasion is high, write about theories the bourgeois ideology of Donald Duck, the mediumistic freedom of Messrs. Hecht and MacArthur, the upthrust of the artistic cinema in Czechos-Slovakia. The simpler of us enlarge on personalities the golden career of Mr. Clark Gable, what Alfred Hitchcock said when presented with forty canaries, and that dear little £4,000 contract that Shirley Temple pulled out of her birthday sock."

"I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture."

"A new film by Alfred Hitchcock is usually a keen enjoyment. Psycho turns out to be an exception. There follows one of the most disgusting murders in all screen history. It takes place in a bathroom and involves a great deal of swabbing of the tiles and flushings of the lavatory. It might be described with fairness as plug ugly."

"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom (Plaza). This so-called entertainment is directed by Michael Powell, who once made such distinguished films as A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel."

"I couldn't give away the ending if I wanted to, for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn't stop to see it. Your edict may keep me out of the theatre, my dear Hitchcock, but I'm hanged if it will keep me in."

"They have not only given us a first-class detective story but they have added the suggestion that this sort of thing might impinge on any one of us, unknowingly, on our way home from business; but would not in the end affect a community armoured with life and decency, private concerns, family responsibilities, mealtimes, bedtimes, train schedules and sunlight. The film has been shot almost entirely, and most magnificently shot, in the streets, homes, stores, and Government departments of New York, and I have never seen a picture that expressed more fundamentally the difference between the extraordinary person who practises crimes of violence, and the normal, blessedly ordinary person who doesn't. The Naked City is at once keen observation and grand filmmaking."

"[On the new CinemaScope process] The effect produced on the viewer is to make him feel he is sitting inside a monster pillar-box looking out through the slot at a world in the rough proportions of a dachshund. For views of processions, or wide horizontal sweeps of plain or water this does not work out badly, but it comes hard-on actors who have to 'exchange confidences from the opposite, sides of a proscenium arch."

"He has a funny voice that makes you nervous on its high notes, a funny face, no one could call handsome; he cannot, so far as I know, act, and he never appeared yet in a film that merited a moment's serious attention. And yet this frank and friendly Yankee hoofer, hat, white tie, tails, and everything, been elected to the academy of international celebrity. After the first gasp of surprise, however, at the thought of Fred Astaire in company with Pythagoras and astronomies and the alimentary canal and the origin of species, you realise that the compilers of the Encyclopaedia [Britannica] have behaved in a perfectly natural way, assuming—as it is reasonable to assume—that they are going to do their job properly for Mr. Astaire [in the next edition to be published]."