I’ve never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it’s history?

Julie Burchill is known for a combative, aphoristic style in journalism and cultural commentary, often attacking sentimentality and what she sees as reactionary “golden age” thinking. This line is typically quoted as a standalone quip expressing her impatience with nostalgia in both private life and politics—especially the tendency to idealize earlier decades as morally or culturally superior. It fits the tone of her columns and interviews from the late 20th century onward, where she frequently framed nostalgia as a refusal to confront present realities and as a rhetorical tool in conservative or nationalist politics. I cannot, however, confidently place the remark in a specific dated article or interview without a verifiable citation.

Burchill rejects nostalgia as a habit of mind and as a political instrument. The punchline—“if the past was so great, how come it’s history?”—treats history as evidence of replacement: societies move on because earlier arrangements were flawed, exhausted, or unjust. The quip also needles selective memory: nostalgia often remembers comforts while forgetting exclusions and harms. As a political argument, it challenges “restore” rhetoric by implying that the desire to return is less about truth than about fantasy, grievance, or control. As a personal credo, it favors forward-looking agency over sentimental attachment to an edited past.