Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.13 August 1977
James Lees-Milne architectural historian and writer, then aged 69: "In a London self-photographic box by the Passport Office I had two snaps taken. They were so gruesome – I looking like a sinister undertaker, only worse – that Alvide [his wife] insisted I have others taken in Bath… I went to Woolworths in Bath today and tried again. Result just as bad, although I am rendered smirking like a sinister footpad, instead of snarling like a confidence trickster. My God, how absolutely hideous I have become. Sad really, when you think of it. As long as I keep clean. I suppose all I can do is maintain that one standard."
13 August 1979
Peter Hall National Theatre director: "Returned to London… diverted to read on the plane, in the New York Herald Tribune, that Miss Piggy of the Muppets has been banned from Iranian television during Ramadan because 'Moslems do not eat pork and consider pigs unclean'."
16 August 1922
Virginia Woolf writer: "I should be reading Ulysses and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far – not a third, and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first two or three chapters… and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom [T S Eliot]… thinks this on a par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw… and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200."
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments