Women Journalists From England

"Beth Chatto, who died last year, was singularly forward-thinking and knowledgeable, and her near in have been a continual draw to enthusiasts for half a century. ’s authorised biography, Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants (Pimpernel, £30), based on diaries, notes and conversations, is a faithful, workmanlike account of a truly remarkable plantswoman and artistic gardener (as well as a very nice person) who emphasised the importance of understanding ecology in growing plants successfully, and whose naturalistic exhibits in the 1970s and 1980s were a revelation."

"The distinguished nurserywoman Beth Chatto, who has died aged 94, was one of the most influential horticulturists of the past 50 years. Well known and respected for the she started in in 1967, she was also an inspirational writer and lecturer whose great theme was the importance of providing garden plants with an environment as close as possible to their native . During the 1970s, she won 10 successive gold medals at the , where she introduced ecological ideas into , demonstrating the possibilities of natural plant groupings, while also achieving the highest aesthetic standards. In those days nurseries arranged their plants for maximum visual impact regardless of differing plant needs. Chatto’s approach was a revelation and immediately established her significance as a guide to better and more environmentally friendly gardening techniques. She stressed the importance of looking at the whole plant, foliage as well as , and judging the quality of a plant by observing it throughout the seasons."

"orientale can produce a lush effect under trees—it is much too coarse for small gardens but can be splendid where something elephantine is needed. The flowers come before the leaves; rather naked-looking pink stems of blue -like flowers in early spring are followed by huge hairy leaves, handsome in the right setting."

"s make a blaze of rose-pink, both ' and , while ’Blackthorn Apricot' is an orange-pink, , perhaps. It now looks well beside the grey-leafed ' with its spires of pea-green hiding tiny lemon-yellow flowers, or with the distinctive ' ’Euphorbioides', a plant I much admire."

"Concerning whether to or not, of course I do not disapproved of all watering. That would be hypocritical, since we must irrigate the nursery crops and do water parts of the garden, such as the Wood Garden, in very dry times. But my thinking on the subject is based on the assumption that water is our most precious commodity as the world population continues to explode, and modern demands for water are often in excess of actual need. Combine this with the , then surely we must be prepared to reconsider some of our gardening practices."

"We are seeing businesses in areas where consumers have previously been ignored, such as inclusive sizing"

"That was defining, I think. I have always felt like a citizen of the world, with a keen sense of what unites us. Had I never moved as a child, maybe I may not have been as entrepreneurial"

"We were taught not to show up unless we had three new trends, so I learned quickly to observe what was going on and to recognise patterns"

"If you could see three disparate indications of something new, and it didn’t matter if you saw it at a dinner party or on a bus, but if you saw three things that all pointed in one direction, you had a trend."

"And I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be amazing, if you could combine the impulse and the marketing of what was new, and allow the consumer to just click and magically receive something on their doorstep?"

"As long as I can remember I have always been thinking about magic in life and how things can be transformed."

"The consumer wanted something new, but the stores were selling something old."

"I came up with the name Imaginary when I left Net-A-Porter and I needed an email address, so I thought I’d better set up an LLC, though I didn’t know what it would be"

"I just never wavered in my belief,” she says. At the start, she adds: “I was a journalist. I had no business experience. But I did have innate people skills.” Her 15 years at Net-A-Porter, she says, “were my MBA. Very early on I realised that nobody was approaching the opportunity to serve consumers remotely and digitally in the way we were"

"All done, all fled, and now we faint and tire— The Feast is over and the lamps expire! ... All dim, all pale—so lift me on the pyre— The Feast is over and the lamps expire!"

"I can only hope that at some point there will be a positive change and I will get to cover that as well."

"“And there’s so much more to the region. There’s so much history, so much culture, so many people doing incredible things in different industries. It’s nice to see those aspects being showcased now, in magazines, in TV, in film, in music. To see that actually there’s a different side to the region, which has always been there. It just hasn’t really been given the platform.”"

"[[Rishi Sunak|[Rishi] Sunak]]'s decision to call a snap general election on July 4 is fast being vindicated as a rare example of sound strategic political thinking from the PM. Not only did it catch Reform off guard, but it has also caught Sir Keir Starmer with his socialist pants down."

"I did worry that last week's column, when I suggested that Rishi Sunak may be on the brink of making an extraordinary comeback, wasn't going to age particularly well. [...] Following Nigel Farage's resurgence and the Prime Minister's disastrous decision to leave the D-Day commemorations early, it’s fair to say that my column now looks about as prescient as David Icke."

"Rather than a Tory wipeout and Labour landslide, Starmer's floundering could lead us to another Theresa May 2017 situation, with himself as the emperor without clothes. Everyone laughed when Sunak first suggested a hung parliament. But the momentum building behind "no overall majority" shows the Tories are having a much better campaign than Labour."

"Rufus Norris's ambitious production is not about safety and is not for the faint-hearted. He is more interested in the darker, distressing aspects of fairytale than in cheap Christmas gags. As the story unfolds, it becomes more gruesome, involving a horrifying ogre (congratulations to Nicholas Beveney's hairy monster) and a magnificent ogress (Daniel Cerqueira) who becomes, in this version, Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law and tries to eat her own grandchildren. I suspect the younger members of the audience weren't half as troubled as I was."

"Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller's production, is the best shrew I have seen. She starts off in a mustard yellow dress with a mustard sharp tongue and suitably pointed features screwed up into a vexed expression. She is given to blood-curdling yells, intimidating her family, hand-cuffing her sister and chopping bits off her ginger plait when particularly aggravated. She is a pain to behold and to hear."

"I used to joke about having a "bee in my Barnet," now I am more likely to bring news about bees in Barnet."

"[From a Derek Jacobi interview] At school, Leyton County High, he was a swot and went on to win a state scholarship to Cambridge. He told his dad that if he was still eating baked beans after five years of acting, he would be happy to become a history teacher, but by the time he was 21 he had joined Birmingham Rep, and was gainfully employed in an old NF Simpson extravaganza about a man who taught a weighing machine to sing the Alleluia Chorus."

"Mysteriously police link arms to form a barrier to prevent demonstrators (demonstra tors of what?) from mounting the pavement. 'Pigs' is now the word. 'Pigs, Pigs, Fascist Pigs', while civilian arms fink to confront the unified, uniformed police challenge. The lines are long and the confrontation spectacular, but suddenly comes a moment of bewildered embarrassment. 'Peace', says the civilians shyly, 'Peace, Peace, Peace.' A policeman blushes. Perhaps because he has lost his helmet."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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)."

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

"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."

"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.)"

"Their physical appearance [...] inspires frenzy. They look beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way."

"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.""

"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.""

"[[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"."

"She cycled off to Oxford railway station with all her kit — beige full-skirted lace over taffeta dress, beige kid court shoes and gloves — in her bicycle basket [...] She was back that night, very offhand about the whole thing."

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

"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."

"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."

"I grew up a somewhere. Now I am an anywhere. Sometimes that disconnect gives me a rootless feeling: an odd vertigo I can't quite nail down. There is, of course, another phrase for it: liberal metropolitan elite. Nobody who has heard the vicious punishments an Ivers government would hand out to people who drive motorbikes without silencers would describe me as liberal. And I suspect actual elites have functioning kettles."

"It is hard to be a conspiracy theorist as a political journalist. Spend enough time staring into the heart of the institutions that run this country, and talking to the people who run those institutions, and the idea that any of them would be capable of pulling off an elaborate masterplan of the type espoused by the crankier parts of the internet becomes laughable."

"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."

"It was here that [[Michael Fallon|[Michael] Fallon]] lunged at me. This was not a farewell peck on the cheek, but a direct lunge at my lips. When I have previously written about this incident (referring to an unnamed MP) I have described it as a "kiss" – but a kiss suggests something romantic, consensual. This was anything but. I shrank away in horror and ran off to my office in the press gallery. I felt humiliated, ashamed. Was I even guilty that maybe I had led him on in some way by drinking with him? After years of having a drink with so many other MPs who have not acted inappropriately towards me, I now know I was not."

"[I]n the ensuing coverage the impression was being left that this was a one-off incident that could now be laughed off. I knew that by failing to act I was letting down not only my 29-year-old self, but also any other women who may have been subjected to the same behaviour since. More importantly, I would be failing to protect other women in future."

"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."