The Blitz Quotes

It makes me feel like I can look the East End in the face.

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

A hostile airship hovering over London … could inflict enormous damage.

London survived the Great Fire 350 years ago. We were not beaten by the Blitz or the horrors of 7/7. History has shown us how strong London is.

During the Second World War, we lived in a flat on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London. At one point during the blitz, the air-raid sirens went off every night for 30 nights, and each time, my parents would grab my sister and me and take us to the shelter beneath Whitechapel underground station.

When we approached the target at half-past two, we stared silently into a sea of flames such as none of us had ever seen before …. In Belfast, there was not a large number of conflagrations, but just one enormous conflagration …

London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren's churches and ushered in the Georgian city.

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

The princess would never leave without me, and I wouldn’t leave without the King, and the King will never leave..

Brexiteers often hark back to the blitz. Maybe they think the 'Britain standing alone' motif adds much-needed heroic purpose to a Brexit future in which Britain stands without trading partners or allies to tackle climate change.

I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father's tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action.

When I talk football with my friends, I don't talk about Tom Brady's hair. I talk about how he handles the blitz, or how he runs his offense. I talk as a fan. I don't want pink jerseys, and I don't want dumbed-down content. I want to be treated as a real fan - because I am proud to be one.

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women.

But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. 'Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they're living their lives at such an intense pitch that it was a completely different way of living.

The bombing was of no military significance since not one soldier had been killed..

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser.