3 December 2020 Julie Burchill My second husband believed I had such a fickle attitude to friendship that each Friday he would update the list of my ‘Top Ten’ friends in the manner of a Top Of The Pops chart countdown.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill As a child, I wanted only two things – to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill It may be a cliche, but it’s true – the build-up to Christmas is so much more pleasurable than the actual day itself.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill From paying off friends’ tax bills to rescuing stray dogs and stuffing £20 notes into the hands of homeless people, I can’t get rid of my money fast enough.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill One Christmas build-up tradition, however, has totally bypassed me – that of going up to town and ‘doing a show.’
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill I’ve never been nostalgic, personally or politically – if the past was so great, how come it’s history?
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill A good part – and definitely the most fun part – of being a feminist is about frightening men.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill What sort of sap doesn’t know by now that picture-perfect beauty is all done with smoke and mirrors anyway?
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Monarchists frequently declare that without the royal family, Britain would be ‘nothing.’ What a woeful lack of love for one’s country such statements express.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Women, more often than not, do things which aren’t remotely relaxing but are all about preening, which is just another sort of work.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, but I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women, usually when I failed to respond to their advances.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill 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.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill When I moved out of London 13 years ago, I found a whole other reason not to drive. This was because my new husband Dan, unlike my dad, did drive, and this became a great source of fun and adventure.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Fact is, famous people say fame stinks because they love it so – like a secret restaurant or holiday island they don’t want the hoi polloi to get their grubby paws on.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Show me a frigid women and, nine times out of ten, I’ll show you a little man.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill 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.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Big women do themselves a disservice when they attempt to become the Righteous Fat (the Righteous Thin are bad enough, all that running around and sweating, somehow believing it means anything).
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill The Feminist Me says that a woman’s right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill As a kid, I grew to define what I didn’t want my life to be like by sitting behind moaning women on the bus, hearing them bang on about their aches and pains, both real and imagined.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill As with most liberal sexual ideas, what makes the world a better place for men invariably makes it a duller and more dangerous place for women.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Surely being a Professional Beauty – let alone an ageing one – is one of the most insecure and doomed careers imaginable.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion things to make life easier for men, in fact.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill 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.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill 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.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio?
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill I’ve always thought of beauty therapy, ‘alternative’ treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels – for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched.
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill Lots of women love to accuse men of being immature when the fellow in question displays a reluctance to ‘commit.’
3 December 2020 Julie Burchill It’s very hard to imagine the phrase ‘consumer society’ used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.
