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It’s received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.
The truth of the matter is, beauty is a specific thing, rare and fleeting. Some of us have it in our teens, 20s and 30s and then lose it most of us have it not at all. And that’s perfectly okay. But lying to yourself that you have it when you don’t seems to me simple-minded at best and psychotic at worst.
As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
It’s very hard to imagine the phrase ‘consumer society’ used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.
As I get older I think, contrary to modern assumption but in line with the old Lerner and Lowe song, that it would actually benefit both them and society if – to quote Professor Higgins – a woman could be more like a man.
Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.
No matter how old and glorious the models, sad indeed is the woman who sees fashion as a means of self-expression rather than an agent of social control.
Being a monarchist – saying that one small group is born more worthy of respect than another – is just as warped and strange as being a racist.
We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal this somehow ‘excuses’ what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.
The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket – they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.