Queen of spleen: The acid tongue of Julie Burchill

On Brighton

When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by... its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common. That is ill temper, bad manners and the wrong number of people for the space in question.

But Brighton is different. Say - hypothetically, mind! - your drug-buddy calls you up and says, "I've scored." Now, he may be on one side of Brighton and you may be on the other, but there's every chance you'll get there before the first gram's even half gone. This must contribute to why Brighton folk rate highest in the land for feelings of optimism, positivity and life satisfaction.

On anti-Zionism/anti-semitism

Jews historically have been blamed for everything we might disapprove of: they can be rabid revolutionaries, responsible for the might of the late Soviet empire, and the greediest of fat cats, enslaving the planet to the demands of international high finance. They are insular, cliquey and clannish, yet they worm their way into the highest positions of power in their adopted countries. They collectively possess a huge, slippery wealth that knows no boundaries - yet Israel is said to be an impoverished, lame-duck state, bleeding the west dry.

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world... (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road.

The Guardian, 29 November 2003

On feminism

"A good part - and definitely the most fun part - of being a feminist is about frightening men."

On asbestos

People think we don't have genocide in dear old Blighty, but the work-related death of the British people... counts as such... They tell you at school how many people communism and fascism killed, but never... capitalism... because a) they wouldn't know where to start and b) it would never end.

The Guardian, September 2003

On Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher has walked a hard and lonely path. She has done harsh things and had a great deal of faith in herself - and, being a woman, this more than anything is why she remains so unforgiven... But that she is now mocked as a mad old bat... waiting in her faded finery until her country calls to her once more, says more about the sheer woman-hating sliminess of her enemies than it does about her. The Times, November 2004

On David Beckham

Born in 1975, becoming a teenager in the late 1980s, Beckham was perfectly placed to be one of the notoriously feral "Thatcher's Children" who allegedly grew up greedy, hedonistic and oblivious to everything but looking after The Big I Am. But for some reason, give or take a mohican, a sarong and a thong or three, his personal conduct far more resembles that of the prewar football champs than the postwar soccer chumps.

Much has been made of David Beckham's alleged dimness over the years - we don't expect our intellectuals to be great footballers, but for some reason we expect our great footballers to be intellectuals. But when it comes to having one's life "sorted", as the young folk say, he is in a class of his own

[The Beckhams] are a pair of beautiful social barometers, lithe litmus tests who highlight the sad failings and desires of their critics. Between them, they have inadvertently managed to reveal more about the plagues of sexism, snobbishness and plain old-fashioned envy that disfigure Blair's Britain than Germaine Greer, Dennis Skinner and Snow White's wicked stepmother put together. I believe that those who hate the Beckhams do so because they so very obviously made it all by themselves. We pay lip-service to meritocracy, but its rare reality disturbs us, makes us aware of our own idleness or bad luck - and of course, idleness can be a form of extreme, long-distance bad luck.

Extracts from Burchill on Beckham, Yellow Jersey Press

On Victoria Beckham

Much as it pains a feminist such as myself to say so, [David] Beckham has been grotesquely, massively, pussy-whipped by his talentless, ambition-hound of a wife. In my defence I would point out that if a woman I'd previously considered strong and accomplished was being remade as a mindless booby by her male partner I'd think she was dick-whipped.

It is not hard to see why Beckham, however misguidedly, is going along with his wife's empty headed game-plan; he is completely in love with the woman, and there is a long tradition in the English working-class of the gentle giant husband giving in to Her Indoors for the sake of a quiet life.

Why Victoria is pursuing such an ultimately destructive course for this formerly golden union is the stuff of darker motivation... By making him more like her - a transient, trivial flibbertigibbet, obsessed with the "bigger picture" of fashion and makeup - her own dismay at her blatant, growingly evident lack of simple talent may be less of a blot on the horizon.

The Guardian, 12 June 2003

On former husband Tony Parsons

The novelist I would least like to see naked is Tony Parsons. People who are fat and 40 wish they were thin and 20.

Tony isn't a fascist but he's obviously got self-loathing "issues" to spit constant bile on the working class, which he comes from, the way he does.

The only thing that interests me about Parsons is why he lies about his age... I've always wanted to be a short-arsed, middle class cry-baby who only ever made it because of who his dad was, and who said... that he would rather live in a savagely unjust society than a fair one because the former is better for writing.

On former husband Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young

Cosmo had buckets of charm, but it took the poor bastard a full morning to write a shopping list, so the commissions were hardly forthcoming. Toby, on the other hand, had talent to burn and application to die for, but he was also cursed with what he himself called "negative charisma": the ability to walk across a room, ostensibly doing nothing bad, and still have half a dozen people hate him by the time he got to the other side. Frankly, I feared for the futures of both of them.

The Times, June 2005

On Professor Camille Paglia, an American author who disagreed with Burchill's review of her book

Fuck off, you crazy old dyke.

3 May 1993

On punk music

I'd been a punk, and knew that the whole thing was, frankly, shit in safety pins. We came to bury the music industry; we ended up giving it one almighty shot in the arm.

The Guardian January 1999

On John Peel

I've always loathed John Peel. It started in the Sixties when I was a child, still staggering under the first blow of benediction by black music. All day long on Radio 1 - most of all, on Tony Blackburn's show - you could hear great creamy earfuls of it. But at night Radio 1 became a white desert. It became "intelligent". That is, it became male, hippy and smelly - it became John Peel.

I hated him in the Seventies, too, because he liked punk, long after punk - the whitest, malest, most asexual music ever - should have been left to die an unnatural death.

The Guardian, January 1999

On anti-war protestors

On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too.

On Blair and Bush

When some clown wants to deal the "killer blow" to Bush-Blair, he'll draw a cartoon of [them] being gay with each other. I like Bush and Blair... If I thought they were serving it to each other, I'd like 'em even more. The Times, November 2004

On abortion

Whenever I am asked my opinion on abortion, I always answer that I am pro-life. Yes, the "smiles" of the foetus may be "sweet", but it is no more actually smiling... than a mote of dust is "flying". Yes, I am a pro-lifer - that is, pro the life of the schoolgirl freed from the burden which would have likely condemned her to a life of stunted poverty, pro the life of the already harassed mother with precious little support - pro, even, the life of the feckless singleton who would prefer a holiday for two weeks than a child for life. I am pro-life because I support the living, not the not-quite-alive.

On the miners' strikes

Since I was brought up a Communist, my heart was with those heroes, fluttering with their beautiful banners, piping mournfully with their brass bands. But my head... my head was somewhere else, mutinously thinking even as I cheered them on: "Well, is it REALLY the best way for men to live their lives, like trolls or moles in the dark, dying young of lung disease?"

The Times November 2004

On those who read her columns

Readers are invited to come and spit at me. I will, of course, welcome the attention.