Non Fiction Authors From England

"Brands have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity…Don’t hire a black woman or a trans woman or a disabled woman and then get cross if they have opinions about their colour or their gender or their disability. The danger is if you’re hired just to be pretty but then you start having opinions about abortion, then you’re gonna get dropped. And of course you should be able to do both."

"Ever since my first novel, people have had quite a snippy vibe about YA, and it’s almost like: ‘Do you think one day you’ll write a real book?’…"

"The publishing world tends to focus more on the “young”, less on the “adult”. But I spend lots of time with teenagers and they’re truly the broadband generation. They’ve been online all their lives and seen things that would make milk curdle: beheadings, graphic violence, hardcore porn. Shielding them is never going to work. What makes this book YA is that it tackles issues in a non-judgmental way. We know these things exist, so let’s talk about them…"

"I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn't be women. That was certainly true of me."

"My view is that despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple."

"I just wanted to get f****d like a woman. That's what it's about. It’s not about what hole it's going in."

"Look, I can't speak for all trans women, but I just want to live my life the way I always imagined it. I have become the version of myself I wanted to be when I was four."

"I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one. I don't really care if someone thinks that is biologically impossible; I've got near enough to be wholly satisfied. I am happy."

"I like to meet as many fans as possible. A number of them have become personal friends. Without the convention I would never see them. I owe a lot to my fans, many of whom have bought my books and remained faithful to me over the years. So I like to put on an enjoyable day for all and I plan to continue with it for as long as possible."

"I have intentionally killed off a few people in my books, bullies who made life miserable for me in my schooldays and early teens when I couldn’t fight back. I have no plans to kill off any more – they are all dead now within my pages! However, I have a particular dislike of extremism. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, right or wrong. When anybody tries to shove their opinion down my throat as though their beliefs are gospel, it makes me angry."

"Gurdjieff then suddenly announced that he was going to Tuapse, on the Black Sea. The dutiful de Hartmanns followed. Their account of an exhausting nocturnal walk forced on them by Gurdjieff in spite of the fact that they were unsuitably clad and also dead tired is a striking example of the autocratic and unreasonable demands which Gurdjieff made on his followers which they nevertheless slavishly obeyed. Olga de Hartmann's feet were so swollen and bleeding that she could not put on her shoes and had to walk barefoot. Thomas de Hartmann had missed a night's sleep because he had been ordered to stay on guard. Their limbs ached and they were both exhausted; but they went on nevertheless."

"Gurdjieff was a dictator. He had the capacity so completely to humiliate his disciples that grown men would burst into tears. He might then show the victim special favour. He demanded unques tioning obedience to his arbitrary commands. For example, he once suddenly announced that none of his followers might speak to each other within the Institute. All communication must be by means of the special physical movements he had taught them. Gurdjieff sometimes imposed fasting for periods up to a week without any lessening of the work load. His authority was such that his followers convinced themselves that these orders were for their own good. Those less infatuated are likely to think that, like other gurus, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power its own sake."

"Reading his discourses made me realize that Rajneesh was a sad loss. He had an extraordinary range of knowledge and a vision of how life should be lived, but he proved incapable of following his own precepts."

"Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God's prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity."

"In 20th-century England, an individual announcing that he was the son of God and would return after death in glory would probably attract psychiatric attention; but earlier generations might have regarded such claims as unsurprising."

"We must consider the possibility that the conviction expressed by gurus is less absolute than it appears in that their apparent confidence need boosting by the response of followers. As we shall see, some gurus avoid the stigma of being labelled insane or ever of being confined in a mental hospital because they have acquired a group of disciples who accept them as prophets rather than perceiving them as deluded."

"Few subsequent gurus seem to have matched the simplicity and directness of Jesus′s message; but it must be remembered that we have very little information. If the world had possessed a detailed biographical account of Jesus, an authentic picture of what he was like as a man, it is quite possible that Christianity would not have been estabished as a world religion."

"In other words, gurus generalize from their own experience. Some gurus are inclined to believe that all humanity should accept their vision: others allege that, when the last trump sounds, their own followers will be saved, whilst the majority of mankind will remain unredeemed. This apparently arrogant assumption is closely connected with certain features of personality displayed by a variety of gurus."

"If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody’s ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens."

"Today the West faces challenges without and threats within. But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece. By assaulting the majority populations in these countries. By saying that our histories are entirely reprehensible and have nothing good to be said about them. By claiming that everything in our past that has led up to our present is irredeemably riddled with sin and that while these same sins have beset every society in history, the debtor should knock at only one door. And most importantly by those who pretend that a civilization that has given more to the world in knowledge, understanding, and culture than any other in history somehow has nothing whatsoever to be said for it."

"Unfortunately, his arguments are encased in a diatribe about mass immigration and our continent's alleged death wish, which is so lurid it often reads like an overheated Breitbart editorial. Murray is usually thought of as a neoconservative; the language he slips into here is much closer to that of a Pat Buchanan-style nativist."

"In the modern interest in slavery, very little attention is paid to the fact between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Barbary pirates (that is, Muslim pirates mainly from North Africa) carried out constant raids not just on European ships but against coastal towns and cities across Europe... The people captured — all white Europeans — would then be either used for ransom or sold into slavery. Over the years during which the Barbary pirates operated, it is believed that they stole as many as one and a quarter million Europeans from their homes. Of course, there is no movement of reparations for those people or their descendants, and no European has seriously suggested trying to find out where any bill for compensation should be sent."

"Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilization was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can't pay universities to do it."

"Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid over everything. Terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Travel anywhere in the Middle East — even to the ‘progressive’ Gulf States — and you will see a modern caste system at work. There are the ‘higher class’ racial groups who run these societies and benefit from them. And then there are the unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an imported labour class. These people are looked down upon, mistreated, and even disposed of as though their lives were worthless. And in the world’s second most populated country, as anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste system remains in vivid and appalling operation. This still goes all the way to regarding certain groups of people as ‘untouchable’ for no reason but an accident of birth. It is a sickening system of prejudice, and it is very much alive. Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism."

"Where does Islam figure in all of this? An Islamised Europe – the denouement of Murray’s story – is fantasy. In a new afterword, he tells the reader that "none of the many facts in this book were able to be refuted and no one of any consequence has even tried to contest or deny them". Yet none of Murray's figures suggests that Europe will have a Muslim majority in any realistically imaginable future."

"There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried out across the media and airwaves, and throughout the education system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider culture, where all major cultural institutions are either coming under pressure or actually volunteering to distance themselves from their own past... We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs."

"This era is defined by one thing above all — a civilizational shift that has been underway throughout our lifetimes. A shift that has been rocking the deep underpinnings of our societies because it is a war on everything in those societies. A war on everything that has marked our societies out as unusual — even remarkable. A war on everything that the people who live in the West have, until recently, taken for granted."

"Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech."

"It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created, one in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it."

"Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life."

"If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal."

"People in wealthy Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose. Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past at least gave life meaning. The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich where we can and have whatever fun is on offer – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in new battles, ever fiercer campaigns and ever more niche demands. To find meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered."

"It is wholly unsurprising that studies show an increase in anxiety, depression and mental illness in young people today. Rather than being a demonstration of 'snowflake'-ism it is a wholly understandable reaction to a world whose complexities have squared in their lifetimes. A perfectly reasonable response to a society propelled by tools that can provide endless problems but no answers."

"If you import the world's people you also import the world's problems, with perhaps some new ones."

"The upsides of migration have become easy to talk about: to simply nod to them is to express values of openness, tolerance and broad-mindedness. Yet to nod to, let alone express, the downsides of immigration is to invite accusations of closed-mindedness and intolerance, xenophobia and barely disguised racism. All of which leaves the attitude of the majority of the public almost impossible to express."

"… many Western people today find themselves imbibing the idea that 'primitive' societies had some special state of grace which we lack today – as though in a simpler time there would have been more female dominance, more peace and less homophobia, racism and transphobia. There are an awful lot of unsupported assumptions among these beliefs."

"Having long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons could do was to remain silent about the change in their country, at some point in recent years it began to appear as though they were expected simply to get on, silently but contentedly, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and accepting the loss of their country: ‘Get over it. It’s nothing new. You were terrible. Now you are nothing.'"

"For even if you believe — as most people do — that some immigration is a good thing and makes a country a more interesting place, it does not follow that the more immigration the better. Nor does it mean — however many upsides there are — that there are not downsides which should be equally easy to state without accusations of malice. For mass immigration does not continue bringing the same level of benefits to a society the more people who come in."

"A society that says we are defined exclusively by the bar and the nightclub, by self-indulgence and our sense of entitlement, cannot be said to have deep roots or much likelihood of survival. But a society which holds that our culture consists of the cathedral, the playhouse and the playing field, the shopping mall and Shakespeare, has a chance."

"The desire to continue to feel yourself guilty arguably finds its endpoint in modern European liberal societies: the first societies in human history who, when they are hit, ask what they did to deserve it. Unassuageable historical guilt carries over into the present."

"Guilt, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed it in his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence, has become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe. People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it."

"Sweden in 1950 was an ethnically homogeneous society with almost no migration. A century on it will look an almost entirely different place. And within the life-spans of many of us it is fair to say that such a country - like most other countries in Western Europe - will become unrecognisable even to fairly recent inhabitants."

"Edmund Burke made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born."

"Contra all the assurances and expectations, the people who came into Europe did not throw themselves into our culture and become a part of it. They brought their own cultures. And they did so at the precise moment that our own culture was at a point that it lacked the confidence to argue its own case."

"… we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences."

"The search for meaning is not new. What is new is that almost nothing in modern European culture applies itself to offering an answer. Nothing says, “Here is an inheritance of thought and culture and philosophy and religions which has nurtured people for thousands of years and may well fulfill you too.” Instead, a voice at best says, “Find your meaning where you will.” At worst the nihilist’s creed can be heard: “Yours is a meaningless existence in a meaningless universe.” Any person who believes such a creed is liable to achieve literally nothing. Societies in which that is the case are likewise liable to achieve nothing. While nihilism may be understandable in some individuals, as a societal creed it is fatal."

"Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair."

"If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?"

"More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past. Alongside this outgoing version of self-distrust runs a more introverted version of the same guilt. For there is also the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin. Mass immigration — the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people — is one way in which this new story has been imagined: a change, we seemed to think, was as good as a rest. Such existential civilizational tiredness is not a uniquely modern-European phenomenon, but the fact that a society should feel like it has run out of steam at precisely the moment when a new society has begun to move in cannot help but lead to vast, epochal changes."

"Compare this with the behaviour of Hamas on October 7 [2023]. As those of us who have viewed the raw footage from the day have seen and heard for ourselves, these terrorists were not just pleased with what they were doing. They were elated. They spent the whole time screaming "Allahu Akbar" with delight. As they decapitated bodies and shot terrified civilians, they were grinning, congratulating each other and seeking acclaim from others."