Christmas commonplaces
Harry Mount reveals the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read – and overheard – in 2020
You’ll get married. Everybody who likes sex does. Kingsley Amis, Take a Girl Like You
I was all right. Augustus John’s response when asked, ‘How are you?’
It doesn’t make me any less a person because I was a binman. It makes the people less because of the state they left their bins in. Some were awful. Former Everton and Wales goalkeeper Neville Southall
It comes to something when I’m upstaged by f***ing gloves. The actor Trevor Howard on his film scene being cancelled because the Muppets were due on at ATV Studios
The soldiers would all be required to attend a lecture about Keats. Their sergeant remarked, ‘I don’t suppose any of you ignorant bastards know what a Keat is.’ Auberon Waugh tells an old army story
All money spent. Can no longer remain maidens. Victorian postcard sent by two girls to their mother from Delhi
There are five things that make a man sexually attractive to a woman: power, money, energy and the ability to make her laugh. Asked about the fifth, he replied, If you think I’m going to tell you that, you must be crazy. George Axelrod, writer of The Seven Year Itch and Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The most intoxicating romance in the lover’s library – the railway timetable. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
I haven’t got anything against the Private Eye letters. Oh no! They marvellously camouflaged mouflaged Denis’s value to the Prime Minister. Kept the reptiles off his trail – that’s my profession he was kind enough to designate as reptiles. Bill Deedes on the Dear Bill letters, speaking at Denis Thatcher’s memorial service, 2003
Carol Vorderman, W H Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Lewis Carroll, A A Milne, Christopher Hitchens, Stanley Baldwin, Alec Douglas-home, Hugh Laurie, Rory Mcgrath and Richard Whiteley People who got a Third at university
All ranks should be left outside the doors; similarly titles and, particularly, swords. Catherine the Great’s first rule for behaviour in the Hermitage
Justin, an undergraduate: Two cheese toasties, please, Neville. Neville, a waiter (to the chef): Two cheese toasties, Tom. Tom, the chef, acknowledging: Two cheese toasties, Neville. Tom (to Neville, when toasties are ready): Two cheese toasties.
Neville (to Justin): Two cheese toasties. toasties Conversation overheard in the buttery of Christ Church, Oxford. Every time ‘Two cheese toasties’ was said, it was said with a different intonation
I spoke Italian because, in Naples during the war, I had a dizionario coi capelli lunghi – a dictionary with long hair – and a very nice girl she was. Denis Healey
I was always extremely disappointed that Edward Thomas did not take the opportunity to note the name and number of the engine of the train. Mr Peto, a trainspotter, on Edward Thomas’s poem Adlestrop
Because of his height, people who expected to be separated at crowded events would say, ‘Meet you at the British Ambassador.’ Daily Telegraph obituary of Lord Sherfield, former Ambassador to Washington, 11th November 1996
Better to be Hereditary Carver than the Keeper of the Closet, with all that entails. Sir Ralph Anstruther, Hereditary Carver of Scotland in the royal household
‘I didn’t mean it,’ he protested with feeling. ‘We never mean it.’ Nina Planck, Washington DC, in a letter to the Spectator, quoting an English guest who offered to help make dinner
People’s features are most characteristic when they’re about to speak or have just finished speaking. Said of Bernini, the baroque sculptor. Particularly true of his bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (pictured opposite)
[People] whose trouble was compounded by booze, or whose trouble had become booze (there is a difference). Frederick Exley on the different types of drinkers, A Fan’s Notes (1968)
…how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the beginning and had to scramble at the curve’s end… Jack Kerouac on driving, On the Road (1957)
Conceit is the strongest of all human failings because it is always detectable. You can never get away with awarding yourself the credit denied to you by others. Writer Nigel Nicolson
Visam Britannos hospitibus feros – I shall visit the British who are ferocious to strangers. The Roman poet Horace, writing in the first century BC. Nothing ever changes
There will be few who, when they are in want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends. Friedrich Nietzsche
I have made a point of asking anyone who was at school with members of the IRA, the INLA, the UDA and the UVF what these people were like at the age of ten. All have agreed that each child displayed a nasty, early sign of terrorism m long before he had a cause. Colm Tóibín in a letter r to the London Review of Books
True happiness in life attended that man who could persuade someone to pay him to work at something which he would otherwise do o for love, anyway. Alan Coren
Shyness is egotism out of its depth. Penelope Keith
A good year. I have begotten a fine daughter, published a successful book, drunk 300 bottles of wine and smoked 300 or more Havana cigars. I have about £900 in hand and no grave debts except to o the Government; health excellent except when impaired by wine; a wife I love, agreeable work in surroundings of great security. Well, that is as much as one can hope for. Evelyn Waugh looks back on the previous year, on his 39th birthday, 28th October 1942
He seemed to have shortened almost to vanishing point the distance between ambition and achievement: no sooner did he approach an art than it surrendered to him. Kenneth Tynan on Orson Welles
Though he couldn’t look young, he came near – strikingly and amusingly – to looking new. Henry James on Mr Longman, a middle-aged dandy, in The Awkward Age
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards. F Scott Fitzgerald
We may be willing to tell a story twice; never to hear one more than once. William Hazlitt
There is one golden rule for t those who enjoy t teasing and poking fun a at people: make sure you do d it properly. If the person concerned takes offence, you’ve done it badly. Nicolas-sébastien Chamfort (1741-94)
She found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Lucidity, simplicity and euphony Somerset Maugham on the aims
A classical education teaches one to despise the wealth it prevents one from earning. An old Oxford scholar
Caffeine is the only psychoactive drug that has not been made illegal at one time in America.
Bodies make their faces pay the price of ageing … his middle-aged face needed flesh. John Updike, The Other Woman
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Britain was the first republic in Western Europe.