Scorn Read online

  Hermann Hesse

  Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.

  Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold

  Let them eat cake.

  Marie-Antoinette repeating an old saying when told the people had no bread to eat

  Voting and buying drugs: the two activities that will drag a professional person into a place where people live on land owned by the council.

  Giles Coren in The Times

  If you’ve seen one city slum you’ve seen them all.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  MY LORD, – Now I am recovering from an illness of several months’ duration, aggravated no little by your lordship’s rude reception of me at the Cascine, in presence of my family and innumerable Florentines. I must remind you in the gentlest terms of the occurrence. We are both of us old men, my lord, and are verging on decrepitude and imbecility. Else my note might be more energetic. I am not unobservant of distinctions. You, by the favour of a minister, are Marquis of Normanby, I by the grace of God am.

  WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

  W.S. Landor, letter to Lord Normanby, who had cut him

  I’ve been offered titles, but I think they get one into disreputable company.

  George Bernard Shaw

  When you are down and out, something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.

  Orson Welles

  Not really. Experience has taught us that those who matter don’t mind and those who mind don’t matter.

  Ambassador to a dinner guest who had forced her fellow guests to swap seats after discovering precedence ought to accord her a place closer to the Ambassador. She had said to him: ‘I expect you find these questions of precedence very troublesome, Your Excellency.’

  We invite people like that to tea, but we don’t marry them.

  Lady Chetwode on her future son-in-law, John Betjeman

  I would rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on your bicycle.

  Chinese reality TV contestant

  What you need is a couple of aspirates.

  F.E. Smith to Jimmy Thomas, who never pronounced his h’s. He had complained of an ’eadache

  No writer before the middle of the 19th century wrote about the working classes other than a grotesque or as pastoral decoration. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Like most liberals, I will do anything for the working classes, anything – apart from mix with them.

  Kevin Day

  I never knew the working classes had such white skins.

  Lord Curzon, seeing some troops bathing during the First World War

  Kings, Queens and Commoners

  Becket parts company from Henry II and Louis VII, after a stormy meeting.

  From The Becket Leaves

  A hereditary monarch is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

  Thomas Paine

  … a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth … a lubberly ass … a frantic madman …

  Martin Luther on Henry VIII

  Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

  Edmund Burke

  It is the folly of too many, to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

  Jonathan Swift

  One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper classes.

  Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

  The aristocratic disdain for work is the one legacy they’ve left that’s really worth something.

  John Cooper Clarke

  The king blew his nose twice, and wiped the royal perspiration repeatedly from a face which is probably the largest uncivilized spot in England.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes on William IV

  Good-morning, gentlemen both.

  Elizabeth I, addressing a group of eighteen tailors

  To promote a Woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion, or empire above any Realme, nation, or Citie, is repugnant to nature; contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance; and finallie, it is the subversion of good Order, of all equitie and justice … For who can denie but it is repugneth to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to leade and conduct such as do see? That the weake, the sicke, and impotent persons shall norishe and kepe the hole and the strong? And finallie, that the foolishe, madde, and phrenetike shall governe the discrete, and give counsel to such as be of sober mind? Of such be all women, compared unto man in bearing of authoritie. For their sight in civile regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel, foolishness; and judgement, phrensie, if it be rightlie considered …

  John Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

  The most notorious whore in all the world.

  Peter Wentworth on Mary Queen of Scots

  Most gracious Queen we thee implore

  To Go Away and sin no more

  But if that effort be too great

  To go away, at any rate.

  Anonymous epigram on Queen Caroline, wife of George IV

  The bloom of her ugliness is going off.

  Colonel Disbrowe on the ageing looks of Queen Charlotte

  Beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness goes clean to the bone.

  Dorothy Parker

  Anne … when in good humour, was meekly stupid, and when in bad humour, was sulkily stupid.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay on Queen Anne

  One of the smallest people ever set in a great place.

  Walter Bagehot on Queen Anne

  The wisest fool in Christendom.

  Henri IV of France on James I of England. Attrib.

  One of the moral monsters of history.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Charles II

  Henry VIII perhaps approached as nearly to the ideal standard of perfect wickedness as the infirmities of human nature will allow.

  Sir James Mackintosh

  A blot of blood and grease upon the History of England.

  Charles Dickens on Henry VIII

  Here lies our mutton-loving King

  Whose word no man relies on

  Who never said a foolish thing

  And never did a wise one.

  John Wilmot on Charles II

  This is very true: for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers.

  Charles II

  Throughout the greater part of his life, George III was a kind of consecrated obstruction.

  Walter Bagehot

  The Radical MP John Wilkes at a formal dinner in the presence of the Prince of Wales proposed a toast to the King’s health, a thing which no one had ever known him do before. The Prince asked Wilkes how long he had shown such concern for his father’s well-being. Wilkes replied: ‘Since I had the pleasure of your Royal Highness’s acquaintance.’

  John Wilkes on the Prince of Wales, later on George IV

  The two most powerful men in Russia are Tsar Nicholas II and the last person who spoke to him.

  Anonymous

  Never was a person less mourned by his fellow men than the late King … if ever George IV had a friend, a true friend, in any social class, so we may claim that his or her name never reached our ears.

  The Times, commentary

  Who’s your fat friend?

  George ‘Beau’ Brummell to Beau Nash, who had introduced the Prince Regent

  Queen
Victoria was like a great paperweight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all over the place haphazardly.

  H.G. Wells

  Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king gear and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved.

  Thomas Carlyle on Louis XIV

  Nowadays, a parlour maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne, would be classed as mentally defective.

  George Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria

  Very sorry can’t come. Lie follows by post.

  Telegram from Charles Beresford to the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, following a dinner invitation at short notice

  No thank you; I only smoke on special occasions.

  Anonymous commoner, confused and overawed, on being asked by George VI at a banquet whether he cared for a cigar

  Thank God for the Civil Service.

  George VI on Labour’s 1945 election victory

  Born into the ranks of the working class, the new King’s most likely fate would have been that of a street-corner loafer.

  James Keir Hardie, Labour leader, on George V

  For seventeen years he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.

  Harold Nicolson, biographer of George V, on his subject

  My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.

  King George V

  He will go from resort to resort getting more tanned and more tired.

  Westbrook Pegler on the abdication of Edward VIII, quoted by Alistair Cooke, Six Men

  God grant him peace and happiness but never understanding of what he has lost.

  Stanley Baldwin on the abdication of Edward VIII

  [A] wife capable of behaving in this way: tantrums and suicide charades – anyone trying to do it with paracetamol isn’t trying – is a witless little girl unfit for marriage to anyone. And the wife capable of exploiting her position to get revenge through mass publicity is a destructive little chancer emotionally located in the foothills of adolescence. The footling story of Diana Spencer makes a bitter republican point, the liability of fairy tales to have been written by the Brothers Grimm! …

  Charles has claims to be a victim of the Asiatic fixing of his family. No wife brought from Karachi to Southall by imperious parents-in-law could better respect an arranged marriage than the English rose heavily urged for the Crown Prince. She was English (after much public scorn of the former Teutonic norm), a virgin and thus free from all tattle, and she looked good. The facts: that she is virtuoso of on-camera tears, that her delight in life is the nightclub and that she seems to have no mind at all, were disregarded. An intelligent man has been fettered in ‘a suitable marriage’ to a frothball and has sought to live his life apart from her. What sharper intimation of the shabbiness of monarchy could there be?

  There are many reasons for dispensing with monarchy, but two will suffice. The job could be done better; and monarchy, just by existing, induces pathetic impulses in other people. There has to be something wrong with an institution which assembles, in various degrees of competitive abjectness, Lord St John of Fawsley, in whom I have real difficulty believing, Sir Alastair Burnet and Lord Rees-Mogg.

  These Firbankian grotesques, prime fruit of the trees of deference, can be relied upon to squelch noisily under royal foot. Happy calling someone twenty years younger ‘Sir’ or ‘Maa-am’ they proclaim a social pyramid in which their own status is secured by guileful proximity to the apex. They fawn and teach us to fawn. Unlike the late Richard Dimbleby, grand under-butler to the nation, they do not tell us that the Queen looks radiant, but they are lit by all the royal refection into which they can creep.

  Such courtiers only echo the sick adoration of part of the nation. Royalty has done a roaring trade since the war in glossy iconic tosh, books about royal lives, houses, tours, weddings, ancestry and interior décor, books, God help us, about royal dogs. The appetite of silly people for living vicarious, reverential lives through this assembly of low-octane duds in jodhpurs is tragic.

  Edward Pearce, the Guardian, ‘The Aspirin of the People’

  Prince Charles is an insensitive, hypocritical oaf and Princess Diana is a selfish, empty-headed bimbo. They should never have got married in the first place. I blame the parents.

  Richard Littlejohn, in the Sun

  Harlot and trollop

  Alleged remarks by Prince Philip in letter to Diana. Officially denied.

  So thick and yet so thin.

  Comedian Linda Smith on Princess Diana

  A sort of social hand grenade, ready to explode, leaving unsuspecting playboys legless and broken.

  Trevor Philips on the Princess of Wales, shortly before her death

  Shea was a master of evasion, more slippery than a Jacuzzi full of KY jelly. You might say he was the first Sensitol-lubricated PR man – particularly appropriate when you consider where he has spent most of his life.

  Richard Littlejohn on Michael Shea, the Queen’s former press secretary, in the Sun

  I’m prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He’s a world expert on leisure. He’s been practising for most of his adult life.

  Neil Kinnock on Prince Philip, in the Western Mail

  Why don’t you naff off!

  Princess Anne to reporters, in the Daily Mirror

  He is a man of many ideas, most of them bad.

  Oliver Kamm on Prince Charles

  It’s no wonder you’re deaf.

  Prince Philip, to children from the British Deaf Association as they stood next to a Caribbean steel band

  My, you must have fun chasing the soap around the bath.

  Diana, Princess of Wales, shaking hands with a one-armed man in Australia, 1983

  People, Politicians and Government

  In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.

  Ronald Syme

  I’m starting to think that the Facebook status update I liked has had absolutely no influence on Government policy at all.

  @RogerQuimbly

  We have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. It can be explained. We have obviously lied throughout the past 18 to 24 months. It was perfectly clear that what we were saying was not true … I almost perished because I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing. Instead we lied morning, noon and night.

  Ferenc Gyurcsány, Hungarian Prime Minister, recorded in a private meeting to his party in 2006. The broadcast caused riots.

  It is a peculiarity of our times that we want politicians to be more human, and then, when they screw up, we demand they be more professional.

  Ann Treneman

  I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.

  Frank More Colby

  He was a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.

  John Randolph on fellow-US-politician Edward Livingstone

  The urge to power is a personality disorder in its own right, like the urge to sexual congress with children or the taste for rubber underwear.

  Auberon Waugh

  One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics.

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  Generosity is part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.

  Leslie Lever

  Being in politics is like be
ing a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it is important.

  Eugene J. McCarthy

  If I had known Henry was going to be President I would have sent him to school.

  A 19th-century President of Bolivia’s mother

  There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.

  Indira Gandhi

  No party in Ireland is prepared to accept anything except the impossible.

  W.E. Gladstone

  Sire, I have other sons.

  Lord Stanley, at the Battle of Bosworth, having been told by Richard III that his son would be executed if Stanley did not support him

  They are nothing else but a load of kippers – two-faced, with no guts.

  Eric Heffer on the Conservative Government

  A liberal is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged.

  Hilton Hamman, South African self-defence expert

  A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.

  Robert Frost

  A liberal is someone whose interests are not threatened at the moment.

  Ann Leslie

  A liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

  Tom Wolfe

  Have I said something foolish?

  Phocion, to his friend, Diogenes Laertius, after the crowd applauded a point in his speech, 150 BC

  First rate men will not canvas mobs: and mobs will not elect first rate men.

  Lord Salisbury

  The people would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.

  Oliver Cromwell, referring to a noisy crowd of admirers

  True terror is to wake up one morning and realise that your high school class is running the country.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.

  Nancy Astor

  Far better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you’re stupid than to open it and leave no doubt.

  Norman Tebbit to Dennis Skinner

  We had lost the art of communication – but not, alas, the gift of speech.

  Gordon Brown, then Shadow Chancellor, on the Labour Party’s 1983 election campaign, 1997

  The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake.