Poor women, frequently Irish, known as Shabbos-goyas or fire-goyas, acted as stokers to the Ghetto at twopence a hearth

There have always been ways of getting around the problem of lighting fires. It was common in the Oriental world for Muslims to go around the houses kindling fires and doing little jobs for the Jews. Israel Zangwill gives us an insight into turn-of-the-century London in his 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto, where he writes, ‘The Rabbis had modified the Biblical prohibition against lighting any fire whatever, and allowed it to be kindled by non-Jews. Poor women, frequently Irish, known as Shabbos-goyas or fire-goyas, acted as stokers to the Ghetto at twopence a hearth. No Jew ever touched a match or a candle, or burnt a piece of paper, or even opened a letter. The Goyah, which is literally “heathen female”, did everything required on the Sabbath.’ Zangwill tells that, when the reb’s fire sank and he could not give direct orders to the shiksa (non-Jewish woman) to replenish it, he would rub his hands and remark casually (in her hearing), ‘Ah, how cold it is!’

C. Roden, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day (1996), Kindle loc. 705

In the early 1950s the African-American sections of America’s inner cities were largely viable, stable communities

Despite the crowded conditions, in the early 1950s the African-American sections of America’s inner cities were largely viable, stable communities; however, the subsequent three decades were quite destabilizing. Federal urban renewal and highway programs required land in inner cities, and African-American neighborhoods were often razed. Low-income African Americans were then relocated into publicly funded housing projects, while middle- and upper-class African Americans were forced to relocate elsewhere. Using a set of policies that both explicitly and implicitly discriminated against African Americans, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) then began to offer subsidized mortgages that enabled millions of Caucasians to purchase homes in the suburbs and flee the cities. Ironically, advances in the civil rights movement later reduced suburban housing discrimination, allowing middle- and upper-class African Americans to relocate to the suburbs as well. As a result of this suburban flight, the remaining inner-city, African-American communities lost leaders, role models, working families, and a solid economic base.

S. Corbett & B. Fikkert, When helping hurts: How to alleviate poverty without hurting the Poor (2014), 85

Why should I do all the hard s**t for someone else, just to hand it over to them on a plate?

Cameron’s plan seemed so admirable; clearly he had been intending to leave on his own terms. Instead, just weeks later, he found that he had accidentally taken Britain out of the European Union in a referendum he had held merely to try to solve a problem with his own party. The Sun reported that the prime minister had told his inner circle, ‘Why should I do all the hard s**t for someone else, just to hand it over to them on a plate?’ It’s a sentiment that most people might share when faced with something as colossal as the Brexit negotiations when they had never intended for there to be a Brexit in the first place. The difference with Cameron was that he had seemed so committed to doing the ‘hard s**t’ until he realised what it might entail. Theresa May, on the other hand, fatally wounded after the snap election she had chosen to call, and which had deprived her of her Commons majority, told her MPs, ‘I got us into this mess and I’ll get us out of it.’ She promised the 1922 Committee, meeting on the first day the Commons returned after the election result, that ‘I will serve you as long as you want me.’ Quite a contrast to Cameron’s desire to serve for as long as he wanted.

I. Hardman, Why we get the wrong politicians (2018), 175

[intended family friendly] policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family-friendly policy: parents would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure. But it isn’t gender-neutral ‘parents’ who need this extra year. It is specifically mothers. As the University of Michigan’s Alison Davis-Blake drily noted in the New York Times, ‘giving birth is not a gender-neutral event’. While women may be (variously) throwing up, going to the toilet every five minutes, changing nappies or plugged into their breast pump during this extra year, men get to dedicate more time to their research. So instead of giving a leg up to parents, this policy gave a leg up to men, and at women’s expense: an analysis of assistant professors hired at the top fifty US economics departments between 1985 and 2004 found that the policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.

At close to 80% by 2016, Sweden has the highest female employment figures in the EU.94 It also has one of the highest levels of paternity-leave uptake in the world, with nine out of ten fathers taking an average of three to four months’ leave. This compares with a more typical OECD level of one in five fathers taking any parental leave at all – falling to one in fifty in Australia, the Czech Republic and Poland.96 This disparity is unsurprising: Sweden has one of the most generous (and, when it was introduced, innovative) paternity-leave policies in the world. Since 1995, Sweden has reserved a month of parental leave (paid at 90% of earnings) exclusively for fathers. This month cannot be transferred to the mother: the father must use this leave or the couple lose it from their overall leave allowance. In 2002, this increased to two months and in 2016 it was further increased to three months. Prior to the introduction of the ‘use it or lose it’ leave for fathers, only about 6% of men in Sweden took paternity leave, despite the fact that it had been available for them since 1974.

C. Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019), kindle loc. 1,663 and 1,677

There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed

‘The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest. But they are not the only ones. There are others – rural peasants in every land, the urban poor in industrialized countries, Black people everywhere including their own continent, ethnic and religious minorities and castes in all countries. The most obvious practical difficulty is the magnitude and heterogeneity of the problem. There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed. Free people may be alike everywhere in their freedom but the oppressed inhabit each their own peculiar hell.

C. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), 90

The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America

It does not seem to me that the English can do much harm to anybody today. After a long career of subduing savages in distant lands they discovered the most dangerous savage of all just across the English Channel and took him on and brought him to heel. But the effort proved too great and the cost too high, and although they acquitted themselves with honour they made sure that they would not be called upon to do it again. And so they anointed the hero of their dazzling feat the greatest Englishman who ever lived, dumped him at the polls and voted Clement Attlee in. Whatever fear the ghost of British imperial vocation may still hold over the world’s little people was finally removed when a renegade Englishman and his little band of thugs seized Her Majesty’s colony in Rhodesia and held it for thirteen years. No, the English have, for all practical purposes, ceased to menace the world. The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe. Particularly those ones.

C. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), 47

A cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before

And his column, ‘String Along with Reggie Okong’, soon became very popular indeed. No one pretended that he dispensed any spectacular insights, wisdom or originality but his ability to turn a phrase in a way to delight our ordinary readers was remarkable. He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before; and our ordinary reader clearly had not and so was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have produced when it was first coined. For Cliché is but pauperized Ecstasy. Think of the very first time someone got up and said: ‘We must not be lulled into a false sense of security.’ He must have got his audience humming. It was like that with Okong; he was a smash hit!

C. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), 10

I should like to assert flatly that detective fiction and science fiction are akin

Without attempting to rival the complexity of my comparative analysis of jazz and science fiction, I should like to assert flatly that detective fiction and science fiction are akin. There is a closely similar exaltation of idea or plot over characterisation, and some modern science fiction, like most detective fiction, but unlike the thriller, invites the reader to solve a puzzle. It is no coincidence—how could it be?—that from Poe through Conan Doyle to Fredric Brown (the Midas expert) the writer of the one will often have some sort of concern with the other.

K. Amis, new maps of  hell (1960), 16