Christmas quotes

Harry Mount reveals the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read, saw and heard in 2021 Christmas commonplaces

When a director told me, ‘A drunk is a man trying to walk straight and speak properly. You’re an actor trying to walk crooked and slur your speech.’ Michael Caine’s defining moment

He had learned by the age of 20 a lesson it took me half a lifetime to learn: namely that there was nothing that could not be said and no one to whom one could not say it. Alan Bennett on Russell Harty (1934-88)

Don’t just do something. Sit there. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (b 1926)

The ventriloquist’s big problem: six letters of the alphabet – m, b, p, v, w and f – are impossible to pronounce without moving your lips.

You’re a mix of butler, cheerleader, Hitler, psychiatrist and artist. Michael Winner on being a film director

Dialogue is the ‘part of a book readers never skip’. Elmore Leonard

All nice rooms are a bit shabby. The Mitford test of interior décor

Show the dance from head to toe without close-up, film it in as few takes as possible and run it from start to finish without reaction shots. Fred Astaire’s rules for filming dance. ‘Either the camera will dance,’ he said, ‘or I will.’

Great minds: Michael Caine; Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips (1813); Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (1941)

There are some men who mind more about enjoying their work than about what they are paid for it and where they stand in the hierarchy. So why, when a woman does the same, should it be taken for granted that she is brainwashed? Diana Athill, Stet

It was not until 887, when he was nearly 40, that Alfred the Great started reading and translating Latin.

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity and all the virtues of man without his vices. Lord Byron’s epitaph to his dog, Boatswain (1803-08) Money, fame and wisdom are the booby prizes of the elderly. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high-born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink, which after all are easy to bear, as troubles go nowadays. Evelyn Waugh writes to Coote Lygon about Brideshead Revisited, 1944

All the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922, & though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses, Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Grosvenor House, & may have seen Julia Flyte. Yet, even in retrospect it all seems very dull… Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home though some were one or the other… You see English Society of the ’20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs… I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is. Lady Pansy Lamb’s letter to Evelyn Waugh when Brideshead Revisited came out, 1945

‘Heseltine is too old, Clarke is too cavalier and Portillo is too ridiculous. So who will succeed John Major? Step forward, Jonathan Aitken … the only Cabinet Minister who hasn’t a single enemy.’ Roy Hattersley, Mail on Sunday, 1995 From Failed Prophecies: An Overview, an article by Craig Brown

The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered, by interests taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by the nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far different from the egoists’ own affairs. Anthony Powell on Kenneth Widmerpool, the antihero of his series, A Dance to the Music of Time

The poet emperor: bust of Hadrian (76-138 AD) in the Museo Vaticano

Animula vagula blandula

Hospes comesque corporis Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula rigida nudula Nec ut soles dabis iocos

Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer, My body’s guest and companion. To what places will you go now? Pallid, stiff, naked – you won’t make your usual jokes any more Emperor Hadrian’s poem to his soul, written as he was dying, 138 AD

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life – the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it – can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances. George Eliot, Middlemarch

There was a celebrated Doge of Venice who found nothing in a play so remarkable as the fact of his presence at it. Philip Hensher All men are mad who devote themselves to the pursuit of power when they could be fishing or painting pictures or sitting in the sun. A J P Taylor

Almost all of the hundred most common words in our language worldwide, wherever it is spoken, come from Old English. There are three from Old Norse – ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘them’ – and the first French- derived word is ‘number’, in at 76. TOP 10 MOST COMMON

ENGLISH WORDS: (1) The (2) Of (3) And (4) A (5) To (6) In (7) Is (8) You (9) That (10) It

Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English

One computer translated ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ into Russian and back again as ‘The whisky is fine but the meat has gone off.’

Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy. And that is just what Eliza did. George Bernard Shaw on what happens to Eliza Doolittle in the end

Below, from left: George Bernard Shaw in 1909; George Eliot, aged 30; Melvyn Bragg