Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
Many years ago, sometime in the last century (how worldly I feel writing that!) I was at the launch party for the dear dead Modern Review mark II and feeling mildly appalled by the whole flimsy thing when a young man introduced himself to me as Nick Cohen and told me he’d be writing for
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
For decades — even before it had its name, which sounds thrilling, as words with an X in them tend to — I’ve been a Brexiter. I even mistrusted the Common Market, as we called the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll before it showed us the deformed, power-crazed face of the EU’s Mr Hyde. The adored MP
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
Margaret Thatcher has been out of power for twenty-six years and dead for three, but in our brave new world of virtue signalling (defined in this magazine by its creator James Bartholomew as ‘the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous…one of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling
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
By 9am this morning, I’d turned down two offers from two newspapers to write about the freshly-dead David Bowie. I told both plainly what I felt: ‘I haven’t been a fan since I was a teenager, when I worshipped him, and I don’t want to add to the chorus of people with nothing to say, but who’ll say
My word, I do like the French! That’s up there with things I thought I’d never say, like ‘Just the one, please.’ But after spending three days in Paris two weeks after the Islamist massacre, I have become their biggest fan. Yes, I’m fully aware that the Parisiennes aren’t the French –— but the pedants
‘The day I found out that Suzi Quatro wasn’t a dyke was the worst day of my life!’ a teenage Joan Jett once complained to a teenage me — and, substituting Chrissie H for Suzi Q, I knew well how she felt. Here I am popping up on page 150: Little teenagers out in the
Now that I’ve given up drugs, I find myself addicted to psychological thrillers written by women, featuring no gore and a great deal of malice aforethought. My favourites this year were (in order of preference) Disclaimer by Renée Knight (Doubleday, £12.99), You by Caroline Kepnes (Simon & Schuster, £7.99) and I Let You Go by
On 2 September 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down after trying to explain away his latest bout of sucking up to Hitler and the deputy leader of the Labour party, Arthur Greenwood (standing in for his absent boss Clement Attlee), rose to reply, the infuriated Tory MP Leo Amery shouted: ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ It’s
On hearing that a ‘transgendered flag of remembrance’ was being flown by a government department for the first time (the Department of Education, on November 20th, the Transgender Day Of Remembrance) I was reminded of that old line about prison food – ‘It’s rubbish, and there’s not enough of it!’ It seems the height of
I learned from this little lot that if one has read The Diary of a Nobody, then one can derive pleasure from even the most pedestrian life story, as there’s always an unintentional chuckle to be had. The former racing driver Nigel Mansell’s Staying on Track (Simon & Schuster, £20) delighted me with its Pooterish
Growing up in the West Country in the 1960s and 1970s, summer left me cold. There was only one place where I could bear to be when the sun shone — the lido at Weston-super-Mare, the nearest coastal town to my Bristol home. Unlike most of the banal backdrops to my childhood, it seemed a
Body dysmorphia, the unfortunate medical condition whereby a perfectly pleasant/slender person believes themselves to be ugly/fat, is a strange and sad thing. I’d always presumed it to be (like anorexia and bulimia) a primarily female problem, so much more importance being placed on the appearance of women than men. Respectable medical surveys indicate otherwise. Nevertheless,
Novels set in the music business (from blockbuster to coming-of-age) are few and far between — far less than in the film industry, say. Is this because writers are scared of looking square, Daddy-O, being as a breed not the most ‘street’ of types, whereas pop stars have traditionally been quite rough, ready and proletarian?
Just so you don’t get it confused with the City That Never Sleeps, Tel Aviv — my favovurite place on earth — now markets itself as the Non-Stop City and, indeed, it never lets up for a moment. We like to refer to the Blitz Spirit; Israel has it. Any of the lovely youngsters playing
Gore Vidal once famously said that ‘Television is for appearing on, not watching.’ I feel the opposite. I’ve just turned down a financial offer from Celebrity Big Brother for this summer’s series so big it made my eyes water — and I’m not easily impressed, size-wise. Verbal people just don’t do well in such a
