Women Authors From England

"Fifty Shades of Grey is so infantile [...] More like baby porn. You have to wait until page 200 for any sex at all. She doesn’t get her bottom spanked until page 400. The writing is jerky: it needed a good edit."

"[On her dislike of Christmas cards: M]y self-esteem isn't based on how many shepherds and robins I've got perched on the sideboard."

"[On her marriage to (Sir) Terence Conran in 1955] It was just criticise, criticise, criticise, from morning to night. It was very wearing. I said at one point, "What I don’t understand is why you want me to stay." He had a good think and then said, "Because you are a very valuable business asset, because you make me laugh and because I got used to you, like my old school rug." What I wanted him to say, of course, was, "I love you." So I walked out."

"Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom."

"I came back from a visit to my mother in Canada to find a note on the mantelpiece from Kevin [O'Sullivan]. It said: "By the time you read this I will be in Moscow. My wedding ring is in the waste-paper basket where it belongs." Kevin didn't divorce me, he deserted me. We divorced by mutual consent."

"Canongate have been wonderful. They've allowed me to write the word 'masturbation' back into the copy. When Lace was first published, Michael Korda [the publishing giant who was Conran's editor] said the world wasn't ready for it. We had to use a polite euphemism. But now we have the verb."

"[On her divorce from (Sir) Terence Conran in 1962] I was 30. My mother said, "Well, perhaps it's as well your father's dead because otherwise you couldn't have got divorced." I gave her an astounded look, but that's how it was then."

"[On being motivated to leave the marriage] I went to St Paul's [the independent school in west London]. That was very important. The mistresses were all unmarried – their fiancees had all died on the Somme – and they were quietly subversive. Paulinas are known for having their own views. It would be very difficult for a Paulina not to expect equality in marriage. So when you get married, and find it's not so, it's a shock."

"[The anonymous (male) interviewer recently read Lace with pleasure] Oh really? My ex-husband paid his lawyer to read it, to check whether there was anything to sue me about. A lovely job for £250 an hour. ["Did he find anything?"] Well Terence didn’t sue me [...] But I don’t think his lawyer did a very good job."

"[On turning down a fourth marriage at the age of 80] He might want to watch football on a Saturday afternoon. I might not be able to eat baked beans in bed at 3am if I want to."

"The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)"

"From early historical times forward we know that horses have been regularly imported to South Asia. We also know the Indus had a long tradition of trade with centres to the west and north. Would it be surprising therefore if horses were occasionally acquired through trade, ultimately reaching the Indus world by land or sea? This would account for the occurrence of a small number of their bones in various contexts without the need to assume their presence must necessarily be associated with profound cultural change."

"Such "ritual hearths" are reported from the beginning of the Harappan period itself. It has been suggested that they may have been fire altars , evidence of domestic, popular and civic fire-cults of the Indo-Iranians, which are de- scribed in detail in the later Vedic literature. It may then be an indication of culture contact between an early group of Indo-Aryans and the population of the still-flourishing Indus civilization."

"Archreological evidence ... both in Iran and India and Pakistan...indeed it almost always lacks any clear hallmarks to establish its originators as Indo-Europeans."

"The orientation of port-holes and entrances on the cist graves is frequently towards the south. [...] This demands comparison with later Indian tradition where south is the quarter of Yama. Among the grave goods, iron is almost universal, and the occasional iron spears and tridents (trisulas) suggest an association with the god Siva. The discovery in one grave of a trident with a wrought-iron buffalo fixed to the shaft is likewise suggestive, for the buffalo is also associated with Yama, and the buffalo demon was slain by the goddess Durgà, consort of Siva, with a trident. [...] The picture which we obtain from this evidence, slight as it is, is suggestive of some form of worship of Siva."

"Their [the Aryans] presence should therefore be in evidence archaeologically… But as yet it is scarcely attested in the archaeological record presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already indistinguishable from those of the existing population."

"Bridget and Raymond Allchin inform us about the early phase of Mundigak I: "Some characteristic painted designs are similar to those of Kili Ghul Mohammad II [north Baluchistan] and Anj ira I [upper south Baluchistan].""

"No support for the entry of ‘Aryan’ populations [in India] is found in physical anthropological data (Petraglia & Allchin 2007)"

"Nomadic herdsmen form an important element of rural life in India and Pakistan today, including the old province of Harappan culture. There is every reason to suppose that they did so in Harappan times, and that they played an important part in the economy and organization of the Harappan world."

"Soft speech Provençal under the olives! Like a queen’s raiment from days long perish’d, Breathing aromas of old unremember’d Perfumes and shining in dust-cover’d places With sudden hints of forgotten splendour— So on the lips of the peasant his language, His only now, the tongue of the peasant."

"I must stress, because a lot of people won't credit it, that it was revolutionary in those days for women to be seen onscreen in news programmes, and we "girl reporters" – there were just two of us – became minor celebrities. ... But we did pioneer new techniques of interviewing, including the vox-pop, where we buttonholed people in the street for their opinions (much to their alarm, at first – they thought we were trying to pick them up. Later we'd be mobbed by people avid to be on telly)."

"By many measures, though, Brown's eighties world was less rule-governed than the present, and some rascals show their colors early on its schoolyard turf. In June of 1986, Brown goes to Oxford for a story on the death of a young heiress from a heroin overdose. She hires a student journalist, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, to make introductions. Mostyn-Owen fobs off Brown at a lunch with posh kids and her boyfriend, "a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson." A bit later, the Sunday Telegraph publishes, under Mostyn-Owen’s byline, a snarky account of Brown's visit, centered on the lunch. Brown finds that she's extensively misquoted—unsurprisingly, since Mostyn-Owen wasn't there. "Boris Johnson is an epic shit," Brown concludes. "I hope he ends badly.""

"Benny Hill once honoured me with a sketch in which I was sent up as eager-beaver "girl reporter Linseed Cranks". Being naive – another period indicator – I was given to wonderful boo-boos such as innocently asking the wife of the Swedish ambassador if her husband had big balls. ("Give, dear! Or throw!" my hilarious colleagues shouted at me for a week.)"

"After making it through her Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne in June, she lived long enough to kiss off her 14th prime minister, Boris Johnson, and welcome her 15th to form Her Majesty's government. From Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. One would love to know — and never will — what the privately astringent Queen Elizabeth thought about this particular arc of political history."

"International diplomacy rarely offers encounters with angels. But Prince Andrew's adhesive contacts with reprehensible foreign riff-raff went far beyond what was explicable or acceptable. He hosted lunches at Buckingham Palace for the insalubrious relatives of Middle Eastern tyrants, invited a Libyan gun smuggler to Princess Eugenie's wedding and Princess Beatrice's 21st birthday party, and went goose-hunting with Kazakhstan's then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazak strongman's baby-faced billionaire son-in-law bought the Yorks's white-elephant pile, Sunninghill Park, for £3 million over its £12 million asking price. This was doubly puzzling because the only enhancements to the house since the Yorks's occupation was a new zoning designation that put it under the direct flight path of Heathrow Airport."

"I was invited to a dinner after he had been convicted. A publicist called me in the office at The Daily Beast and she said, "Tina, I want you to come to this great dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's house, and the other guests are Charlie Rose, Woody Allen and Prince Andrew." Lloyd Grove, who was a journalist at The Beast, reminds me whenever I see him that I yelled into the phone: "What the hell is this — the Predator’s Ball?" I was outraged that she hadn't seemed to have read our pieces. I said: "I've printed pieces about this guy. No, thank you very much. I decline. I don't want to have dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's house.""

"The last hard patriotic triumph in most Brit's recall was Margaret Thatcher's 1982 invasion of an obscure dot in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands, to wrest it back from another country no one has time to read about, Argentina."

"When did Britain go out of its mind? As a transplant from London to New York, I'm often asked that question."

"Unlikely heroes and anti-heroes emerged. A viral favorite was John Bercow, the barrel-chested Speaker of the House of Commons, whose calls for "Order, Order Order" over the brawling MPs have sound-tracked the opposite of his exhortation."

"[[Conrad Black|[Conrad] Black]]'s 1,300-page biography has had stellar reviews. Historians from Alan Brinkley to Daniel Yergin have hailed it as the best single volume on the many perplexing aspects of FDR's political life. A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as "that man"."

"Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose."

"The moment the contract was signed, he was utterly different from the person who had been romancing me for five months. It became clear that nothing that he'd told me was true in terms of what the budget was going to be. And I'd never walked into that weird crepuscular den of Miramax when he was courting me. I'd always met him in a restaurant. As soon as I was sitting in that room with that horrible mangy sofa, which I now think of as the Plymouth Rock of the #MeToo movement — suddenly I'm sitting there in this dark room with Harvey [Weinstein] yelling and screaming, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is insane."

"I had to admit I liked him hughly. He was in an American country gentleman's three-piece suit and heavy shoes, and was by turns urbane and shady. His face seems to have been made for the cartoonist's distortion the gargoyle lips, deep furrows in the brow, the hint of five o'clock shadow that gives him such an underworld air when he's sunk in thought."

"The truth is that, although he'll be trouble, he'll also be enormous fun and H. has had so many years of Thomson greyness this vivid rascal could brine back some of the jokes. "I sacked the best editor of the News of the World," he said at one point. "He was too nasty even for me. [[w:Bernard Shrimsley|[Bernard] Shrimslev]] had to ask himself what the ordinary man wanted to read that week. Stafford Somerfield knew!""

"Princess Diana, the shy introvert unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the world's stage. Prince Charles, the public star unable to enjoy a satisfying private life, has made peace at last with his inner self. While he withdraws into his inner world, his wife withdraws into her outer world. Her panic attacks come when she is left alone and adulation-free on wet days at Balmoral; his come when his father tells him he must stop being such a wimp and behave like a future king. What they share is an increasing loss of reality. Ironically, both are alienated by the change in the other."

"If he passed her up he would find himself like a royal Roman Polanski dating thirteen-year-old girls when he was forty. The press, led by Nigel Dempster, had corralled poor Lady Diana and were howling for a happy ending. His family wanted it. The public wanted it. Like the last Prince of Wales, he liked to confide in married women, and his two favorites, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wanted it. They had met the blushing little Spencer girl and deduced she was not going to give them any trouble."

"A few months before leaving for LA, I found myself bored one Saturday morning and decided to download a new app I'd heard about called Hinge. This time, I chose not to be so prescriptive. I made my age range wider and said I was open to dating men with children. I matched with a man whose photos weren't all that great. He described himself as a "Zennist" and had three children — three! — but he was persistent. He started messaging me every single day, which, after a small eternity of emotional f***wittage, seemed to me to be deeply weird. After a fortnight of texting, we agreed to a date. I said I'd only be free for two hours from 5-7pm. I walked into the hotel bar with zero expectation. After all, I was moving to LA. I had a whole new perspective on single life. A distractingly handsome chap sat at a table by the window. It was the first time I had ever met someone on the apps who looked better in real life than in his profile picture. We chatted easily. He asked great questions. By 7pm, I was annoyed with myself that I'd invented a dinner to go to. He kissed me on both cheeks as we said goodbye. We went on more dates. I didn't move to LA. We'll have been together seven years in March. He is now my husband."

"I understand now why, if you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, how difficult it can feel to speak up or escape it [...] Part of the abuse is that it removes your layers of self-confidence until you are so co-dependent that you don’t think you can exist without the other person. Often the other person is telling you things like "You'll never find anyone who loves you like I do." I’ve had that said to me in that relationship."

"For reasons that have never been clear to me, the call centre for my insurer – a policy bought through a broker in Dubai, regulated in the Channel Islands, and falling under the umbrella of one of the biggest insurers in the US – is located in Scotland, ensuring that the man who picked up my call had to strain as hard as I did to pretend this situation was normal."

"Most of us understand, at least in theory, that marriage is not an achievement but a choice. We have learned to value ourselves apart from the value the dating market puts on us. We own our power and, in some cases, our apartments. We try not to go around saying things like "all the good ones are gone.""

"Many years ago, I went to a party in central London thrown by a host known for curating interesting and heavyweight guest lists and, on entering, encountered David Irving, the disgraced historian and Holocaust denier. As a marker of social pariahdom, Holocaust denial is up there with – or perhaps even more potent than – a conviction for sex offences, and I turned around and walked out; not through any particular moral superiority, but because I thought "notoriety" as a criteria for inclusion on a guest list was stupid and offensive. As I left, I remember looking across the room at the host and thinking: you silly bloody bint, I'm embarrassed for you."

"Don’t be afraid to put the guy with 30 years of experience on the bench and let him consult a group of younger folks to lead a project and challenge the status quo,” she advises. “If you are going to get people interested in this industry, it can’t continue to look how it’s always looked. It’s okay if everybody’s skin color is different at a table. It’s okay if half of the people in the board room are covered in tattoos. It’s okay if someone came from the cannabis industry and is now growing lettuce in a vertical farm. We’ve got to be able to cross over into the next stage of this industry’s evolution.”"

"“I was named CEO in September of 2022 and we’ve made some big shifts. We have gone from focusing on top-quality plants to becoming an employee-centric company. My best asset is people and I want to treat that asset the best way possible,”"

"I went into a supplier’s booth and stood there, ignored, for about 20 minutes, despite having 12 workers in the booth,” she explains. “It was right when the show floor opened, and they weren’t busy. I now call it the khakis and polo club because that’s what every one of those guys were wearing. It’s the traditional footprint of so many in our industry, but I don’t participate. I’m tattooed. I’m young. I’m female. So was like, ‘Okay, here’s a bias.’ So now I'm very sensitive to the gender gap in our industry.”"

"Our offerings as a supplier were very traditional. When we lost King’s Discount Store, it was an opportunity in disguise. We started to change our basket combinations and move away from that flat footprint into more container gardening with more perceived value on the baskets,”"

"I do not like the status quo. I am a person who holds space for everyone and I don’t make judgments,”"

"“I think it was in 2018 at Cultivate where I challenged all of our brokers and suppliers saying, ‘I want to be two years ahead of the market. I want to try everything I can in Idaho before you release it.’ I want to be on point as soon as that new variety hits the market.”"

"That's something I value in a leader — somebody who has heart. They have their heart in it, and they care while still being consistent, strong and business-oriented. That's hugely valuable to me in every single way. And that's how I want to show up at that table and every other table that has an opportunity for growth, anywhere, in any industry, in any room.”"

"“That has been a really hard lesson, though,” she says. “I had FOMO — fear of missing out. I wanted to be in all places and all things. But that’s not the case anymore. I know where I stand as a human. I know what I want to show up for, and I know how much currency I have in the tank to be able to accomplish things.”"

"“If something really hard comes in front of me, I ask myself, ‘Will this matter in a year? In five years? In 10 years? And if the answer is no to any of those questions, then I need to make sure I’m not giving it too much energy in that moment,”"