Julie Burchill

My favourite quote of all time comes from John Stuart Mill: ‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing

The late Mrs Merton, bless her, would never have seen fit to ask Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt: ‘So, what first attracted you to each other?’ Perhaps the most beautiful film stars of their generation, they also possessed a devil-may-care air which combined with their charity work to make them seem both reckless and righteous

You know you’re getting old not when the policemen start looking young, but when a public figure dies and you say ‘O, I thought they were dead already!’ So it was for me when I heard that the Australian writer Richard Neville had died of dementia at the age of seventy four last week. Neville was

When I think about love, that old line by William Goldman about Hollywood comes back to me: Nobody knows anything. It seems that as we grow franker about sex (witness the Naked Attraction TV show, recently described as ‘Blind Date in a brothel’) love reveals less of its mysteries. Just as we’ve all now seen

I’ve never seen a National Treasure whose head I didn’t have a strong urge to shove down the nearest toilet. So when I read that Christopher Biggins had entered the latest Celebrity Big Brother house for a rumoured £150,000 – far, far less than what I was offered, to put it mildly – I fair hugged

Ever since Friday’s Glorious Victory, one of the chief recreation activities of we Brexiters of a childish bent has been the Taunting Of The Remnants, mostly online. ‘How are you comforting yourself?’ one Facebook post asked. ‘In the usual way – with the tears of the vanquished,’ I replied. ONLY ONE LIKE! For self-proclaimed ‘progressives’,

Let me start by putting my podgy little hand up – the one not ferreting fervently through a big box of Belgian chocs, that is. Starting out positively sylph-like, I’ve reached a size 18 at the age of 56 solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure. I have no time for people (except

I consider myself such an extreme feminist that I make Germaine Greer look like Greer Garson. (Ask your gran.) But this doesn’t mean that I have to believe women are superior to men in every way. Yes, we violently attack, sexually assault and feel the need to commit murder far less than they do. But

I must admit to snigger-spitting my Sugar Smacks recently as I read an interview with Eddie Izzard in the Times. (Odd, because he’s never made me laugh before.) He spoke thus: ‘I would have been a soldier if I’d knew which war I’d have to fight. I was ready to apply but when you join

I was interested to read recently that Her Majesty The Queen’s party planner, Lady Elizabeth Anson, makes a point of putting boring guests together as ‘They don’t realise they’re the bores, and they’re happy.’ Knowing what passes for sparkling wit among the English aristocracy, this did make me chuckle – the social Siberians are probably

I’ll never forget the first ‘Funisher’ I met. It was sometime in the late 1980s when you could meet all sorts of interesting girls. She was one of the moderately attractive, moderately intelligent broads the media has always been jam-packed with, the on-off up-down girlfriend of a male mate of mine, and one night she was

I’ve pointed out before that to be a woman who sucks up to Islamic extremists is to be a somewhat upmarket but equally self-deluded political equivalent of those strange women who write love-letters to incarcerated rapists and serial killers of women. I’ve recently spotted another septic sister-under-the-skin, though I imagine this one will be better-dressed and

Though I adored David Bowie as a teenybopper, I felt that one would have had to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lush smorgasbord of lachrymosity that accompanied his death earlier this week. I said as much in a short blog on these very pages. Soon I was trending on Twitter,

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill and Tim Stanley discuss Brighton’s Brideshead set” startat=1352] Listen [/audioplayer]My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when