Top 15 Tanya Gold Quotes

[T]his is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder's, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema's most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.

When I was young, being female was not something to enjoy, but to navigate carefully: there was always a terrible jeopardy in it. When I look back on the mild workplace assaults and the insinuations — so long ago I feel they were directed at a different woman — what strikes me most is how little they had to do with sex. I don't think men who harass women at work want sex: at least not principally. It is a function of inadequacy and the dominion that masks it: putting you on your knees, where you belong.

Notting Hill is two cities with two kinds of stories, the dreamlike and the deadly. One Notting Hill contains residents who paid more capital gains tax than three major British cities in 2020; in the other, looms Grenfell Tower, swaddled in rippling tarpaulin. These two depend on each other, because you only need a dreamworld if reality is unjust. Nowhere else in London is so polarised, or practices self-worship like this.

I've long thought that monarchy allows us to imagine our kingdom – our national story – as more interesting and singular than it is. Monarchy is attractive but necrotic: it looks backwards by nature. If there was an opportunity for dynamic monarchy – the Norman lawmakers, perhaps, or the Tudor propagandists – we haven't taken it. The instruments of monarchy are imperial, and in daylight they look increasingly odd and piteous. It's a truism of addiction – and many are addicted to monarchy – that the larger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one.

Holocaust Memorial Day is 24 hours of shame, but not in the way you think. It was designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and it falls on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet forces: January 27, in 1945. This is tragedy enough for the Jewish people, you might think, but HMD — I don't mind giving it an acronym, it deserves one — has changed. It is now an annual festival for the abuse of living Jewish people and the denial of our loss, and we brace ourselves for the memory of the past, and the cruelty of the present. This was the worst year yet.

It's a truism that every wretch in the village is a king on the day of the pogrom because he is not a Jew. And here is his book.

His conclusion is darkly hilarious. Corbynism failed because he was not brave enough to defy the cabal: the people needed more antisemitism, and Corbyn denied them.

[In the book under review] When left-wing activists — Momentum, for instance? — organise, it is righteous, but when "Zionists" organise, it is sinister.

I now know my generation of Jews is the luckiest in modern history. I never saw antisemitism in my youth. I know that others did. OK, a boy at my school shouted, "Jew" at me once, but I knew it was lust. Likewise, a boy at my college – a devout Christian – also shouted "Jew" at me once, but I think his DNA test would come up 25 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish at least, and we both knew it.

I read social media all week, and it is a maelstrom. One man says he laughed on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another says the Final Solution wasn't final enough. Yet another says the world is run "mostly" for the benefit of Jews. I'm called a genocidaire, immune to non-Jewish suffering. I present my credentials – a Liberal Zionist, in favour of two states – which are dismissed, since, to some, all Zionists exist in a state of pre-murder. The most sympathetic people are religious Christians, which initially confuses me: I am contrite, and grateful to them. I am not grateful for "allies" who use Jews to pursue their vendetta against Muslims – and if you mention European anti-Semitism, they insult you and withdraw, for you have disappointed them.

I am afraid now, though it is hard to write about fear because fear is formless and because it offends my pride. I have heard the silence of my non-Jewish friends with horror because they, apparently progressives, should know better. I can't write more, for maybe one day I may want to speak to them again.

Still, on he goes, glibly, hearing nothing he does not want to hear, and seeing nothing he does not want to see: a god in tiny rooms.

[T]he Corbynites, who live on fantasies and conspiracies, can convince themselves of anything except their complicity in their own failure.

Truss did not fall: it is worse than that. Rather, and obediently, she shattered.

I met [Liz] Truss at university, long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart.