"I receive racist and sexist abuse online on a daily basis. I have had rape threats, death threats, and am referred to routinely as a bitch and/or nigger, and am sent horrible images on Twitter"

"I respect the result of the referendum and no-one wanted to thwart it in a perverse kind of way. But we need to be clear, this is not a Tony Benn Brexit, this is Donald Trump Brexit, and it's got a very ugly side."

"There's no question women politicians get a level of abuse online which men don't get. New media and the anonymity has unleashed a really quite violent misogyny which I didn't see when I started in politics, although consistently women always get more severe abuse in the media than men."

"I'm in politics to be a voice for people who don't have a voice."

"I want power. I suppose that's the story of my life - seeking power."

"When I had been at primary school, I was very good at writing essays. It was a big thing. My essays were so good they would get pinned up on the wall and read out to the rest of the class"

"If you want people to participate and be interested, part of that is to have a political class that looks like the population as a whole."

"Of course, sex is great. We don't have to pretend otherwise. But people shouldn't feel victimised by a pornified culture and girls shouldn't be forced to do things they don't feel comfortable with."

"I put being a mother ahead of being a politician."

"White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game."

"I think the public sector cuts have the potential to set back race relations and black and ethnic minority communities by a generation."

"I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children."

"On balance Mao did more good than harm."

"I am surprised that they chose to bring in blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland, instead of nurses from the Caribbean who know the language and understand British culture and institutions. [...] Are Finnish girls, who may never have met a black person before, let alone touched one, best suited to nurse in multicultural Hackney?"

"Being an MP is the sort of job all working-class parents want for their children — clean, indoors and no heavy lifting."

"Ever since my colleagues and I have been in the house, there have been a series of incidents that give rise to concern. Our visitors are sometimes treated less than politely and deliberately misled … Visitors and we ourselves have been jostled. We have been challenged by attendants as to our identity in an unsubtle attempt to embarrass us. These occurrences are too frequent and have been going on for too long."

"You have to start from an understanding that all white people are racist."

"Ireland is our struggle. Every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed."

"If you want to be in with a gang then you have to go along with hiding people's things."

"AAB actively campaigns to reduce aggression and counter bullying by creating peaceful campaigns such as Cyberkind."

"Everyone wants to be around her because she's always the one at the discos and at the centre of things."

"There is equality in the office but not on the street"

"Her iron will won international respect. Her unabashed femininity gained women’s. Margaret Thatcher was a lady’s lady."

"Women are more powerful than they think. A mother’s warmth is the essence of motivation. If we could liquefy the encouragement, care and compassion we deliver to our children it would surely fill an expanse greater than the Pacific."

"With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!"

"Tribalism has become trendy."

"Global warming causing climate change may be the ultimate issue that unites us all."

"More than a billion women around the world want to emulate western women’s lifestyles and are rapidly acquiring the material ability to do so. It is therefore vital that in our leadership we display some reserve and responsibility in our spending so that the world’s finite resources will be available for our children, their children and their children’s children."

"Bullying behaviour can be communicated via text, mobile phones, internet, social networking sites, forums. But we can't limit it because these messages are then reinforced by television which glamorises yelling, swearing and vulgar behaviour as the way to walk the red carpet of acceptance."

"The style of kindness has changed."

"The first time you see Winston Churchill you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend discovering his virtues."

"I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?"

"Go to work on an egg."

"Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon."

"[Published shortly after Weldon died in January 2023] Twenty years ago, I was dispatched to interview Weldon at home in Hampstead, north London. Her then husband, Nick, answered the door and immediately began a brutal interrogation. My name sounded familiar. Hadn't I given Fay's novel The Bulgari Connection, a book controversially sponsored by the Italian jeweller, a stinking review? Uh oh. But I wasn’t about to confess: I had a job to do. Was it definitely me he was thinking of? And was the review really a stinker? Maybe marital loyalty had made it seem worse than it was. The interview began. Fay and I were getting along just fine when the door burst open. In strode her husband, in his hand a copy of the dreaded review, extracts from which he proceeded to read aloud as my entire body turned crimson (though I have to admit – icy chip and all that – I was also thinking what a good anecdote this would make later). As for Fay, a woman who understood revenge, she was enjoying herself mightily. "She's very hard, isn’t she?" she said to Nick, smiling like a goblin. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it." And then: "Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now." His work done, Nick left the room and we resumed, as if nothing had happened."

"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."

"One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods."

"I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?"

"Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on."

"Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully."

"The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself…They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them."

"Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur? Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it. ...I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think..."

"The trouble about the fashions is, there are too many going on at once, and you can't follow them all. Sometimes, I think I will give them all up, and just be dowdy."

"Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, and afterwards no sign of where they went is to be found."

"To the politician we are something of a dark horse. He does not know what we want; he wishes he did. Do we know ourselves? Vaguely we know that we don't want the politician."

"Rose Macaulay is a wise guide, tolerant, generous-minded, liberal, courageous, cheerful, and her judgments of society and social values are always sound."

"The best book she has written, and that is saying a lot."