Following yesterday's display of vitriol by Dorothy Parker, I thought I'd share with you a few more cyanide-scented sentiments and arsenic-flavoured accolades from Jennifer Higgie's The Little Book of Venom, worthy of being savoured.A quite excellent nosegay of nastiness, this innocent-looking little collection is one in which musicians are murdered...
Bernard Levin on the music of Frederick Delius: "The musical equivalent of blancmange"
Oscar Wilde on Richard Wagner: "I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage."
...politicians are pulverised...
Benjamin Disraeli on Robert Peel: "His smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin."
Aneurin Bevan on Clement Atlee: "He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match."
...historical figures are hammered...
Charles Dickens on Henry VIII: "The plain truth is that he was the most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England."
George Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria: "Nowadays, a parlour maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective."
...playwrights are poleaxed...
H G Wells on George Bernard Shaw: "An idiot child screaming in a hospital."
Queen Victoria on William Shakespeare's King Lear: "A strange, horrible business, but I suppose good enough for Shakespeare's day."
...divas are destroyed...
W B Yeats on Mrs Patrick Campbell: "An ego like a raging tooth."
George Bernard Shaw (again) on Isadora Duncan: "A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it."
...and authors are assassinated...
Lord Byron on John Keats: "A tadpole of the lakes."
Dame Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf: "Virginia Wolf's writings is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere."
Finally, here's an all-purpose Arab curse that is seriously worth committing to memory for daily use in any stressful situation: "May your left ear wither and fall into your right pocket."
The Little Book of Venom: A Collection of Historical Insults, compiled by Jennifer Heggie in 1999, is published by Michael O'Mara Books Ltd.
4 comments:
poison pen how topical..
Ha! This is so going on someone's Christmas wish list, and I think that someone is me.
There's a whole bunch of poison pen comments (rather than strokes) Abraham Lincoln made which I love and which you can find at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/abraham_lincoln.html
One of my favourites: "He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met"
Thanks, guys... Probably just as well Byron and Lincoln never met!!
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