JAMES, P.D.

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We are bedevilled by political correctness … If in speaking to minorities we have to weigh every word in advance in case inadvertently we give offence, how can we be at ease with each other, how celebrate our common humanity, our shared anxieties and aspirations, both for ourselves and for those whom we love? … Political correctness is a risible authoritarian attempt at linguistic and social control. ( Speech in 2008 on policing in the 21st century)

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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism. ( Paris review 1995)

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The Children of Men

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I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreciate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

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Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

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Unnatural Causes

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What about his style?” asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.

“Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...”

“What was he like as a person?” asked Dalgliesh.

“Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else’s, which didn’t exactly make for popularity.”

“A typical writer, in fact?” suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.”

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