Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
As an erstwhile fellow peddler of dirty books (Ambition, 1989), I’m in two minds about E.L. James. On the one hand, I’m glad that I never made money writing tosh which led legions of gullible women to collude in their own humiliation. Granted, my heroine had SOLD tattooed on her forehead, but so far as
It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning. Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders
Is anyone actually watching the Oscars anymore? Until ‘The Incident’ between Messrs Smith and Rock last year the direction of travel was clear. Between 2014 and 2020 the televised Academy Awards lost almost half their viewers, the number falling from 43 to 23 million. This year, in March, they were at 18 million with punters
Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then
On hearing of the Duchess of Sussex’s alleged fondness for the Diabolo de Cartier Music Box (retailing for almost £3,000, in lacquered wood and gold-finish metal, freed bird motif turns when ‘La Vie En Rose’ plays), I reflected on the adult liking for childish things. Though the box is ostensibly for Meghan’s infant daughter Lilibet Ltd – sorry, Lilibet Diana – a
With festival season just around the corner, it is fitting that Prince Harry’s Worldwide Privacy Tour is coming to a climax. The Duke played to a jam-packed High Court crowd last week. They were keen to hear the latest solipsistic stream-of-unconsciousness of our tormented troubadour. For two years now, Harry has – sometimes with his
I love my adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove – I moved here in 1995 and I still feel like I’m on holiday. I love everything about living here. The obvious thing is the sea. Although I hear what our local Surfers Against Sewage say, nothing’s going to keep me out of the briny. The
I’m not big on nostalgia – if the past was so great, how come it’s history? – but I allowed myself a smirk of reminiscence on reading recently that Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute (‘a professional body focusing on management and leadership’) has put the damper on the age-old tradition of
Though wokeness is a vile thing, it has contributed to our culture in one fortunate way – by inspiring brilliant books which refute it. The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side has thrown into gloriously sharp relief the difference in the intellectual
Since I’m so old – 64 this summer – Facebook has always been my preferred form of social media. But if I was a softer soul there’s a feature on it that might really tug at my heartstrings: ‘See your memories.’ Because many of mine – going back more than a decade – are now
You hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over professions in the near future – and I think television presenters should be particularly worried. Think about it. Robots wouldn’t expect salaries of hundreds of thousands of pounds. They wouldn’t jump queues. They wouldn’t have lurid headlines about paedophile brothers casting a pall over their
I was never a monarchist. One of my earliest memories is of being a bolshy little girl refusing to stand up for the national anthem played (as was the custom in places of public performance back in the twentieth century) after a showing of ‘Born Free’ at Bristol Gaumont in 1966. Still howling at the travails of
When the singer Lily Allen found herself flak-catching recently, she was quick to point out she was the OK kind of nepo-baby, because: ‘The nepo-babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics, if we’re talking about real world consequences
Danielle Epstein’s story is a sad one; last year she was in the process of buying a house with her boyfriend when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, underwent a serious operation and had to learn to walk again. He wasn’t the only one who walked; Miss Epstein did also, and not just down
Though I’m not the most avid fan of her oeuvre, I was cheered recently to see that Ellie Goulding wanted her new album to be less personal: ‘It was such a relief and really refreshing to not be sitting in the studio going through all the things that happened to me and affected me… it’s
It’s so strange now to think that I spent several happy years as a Guardian columnist, the only billet from which I’ve ever garnered a stand-alone anthology – The Guardian Columns 1998 – 2000: There is no other commentator who can turn received wisdom on its head like Burchill… no other journalist who can combine
The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when
You can always rely on theatreland to serve up drama off stage as well as on. Hopefully the spat between Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir David Hare over whether musicals are ‘killing’ theatre will run and run. Writing in The Spectator last week, Hare moaned: ‘Musicals have become the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything
Where to start, with a police force where decent behaviour seems to be the exception rather than the norm? For a quarter of a century since the murder of Stephen Lawrence caused the Macpherson report to call the Metropolitan police ‘institutionally racist’ we’ve been comforting ourselves – in the manner of frightened children humming in the dark
Before the Sussexes – before the Grabdication was a twinkle in Meghan’s crocodile eye – there was Sarah, Duchess of York; greedy, grasping, grubby Fergie. Some see Diana as when the stiff upper lip of heritage royalty became the trembling lower lip of the new breed. But the Princess of Wales was a teenage virgin with
