Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pa… - Julie Burchill

Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index.

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.

Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. . . Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination. . . Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those [five] abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life - mine.