Craig Brown - The Lost Diaries

But Victoria wasn’t the kind of girl to let a rulebook stand in her way. ‘No way, José!’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m out to have fun!’ One of my totally favorito scenes in my screenplay is when the young Victoria gets a fit of the absolute gigglies when her chewing-gum shoots out of her mouth while she’s talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a very senior vicar at that time! And the next minute, she’s standing up to the German Prime Minister Adolf Hitler, telling him straight up that no way is he going to invade England, not while she’s Queen. It’s that kind of period detail – fun and laughter, yes, but also quite a few tears – that’ll make the whole film such an emotional roller-coaster!

SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK

Henry James died today, in 1916. He was the worst writer in the world. He never went out. He never rolled up his sleeves and put his arm up the backside of a cow. He never slapped a woman about the face to teach her a lesson. He never lived. It is an absence which shows in his ‘novels’.

V.S. NAIPAUL

Harold a little peeved over dinner at L’Artiste Assoiffé when the under-waiter fails to congratulate him on the truly splendid production of The Caretaker that is presently running to ‘packed houses’ (theatrical speak for ‘full up’!) at the Shaw Theatre. I don’t think anyone else around the table notices, but I can always tell when Harold is a bit ‘put out’ because he tends to smash the plates with his fists.

But otherwise an evening of great jollity, with the best intervention coming from David Hare who expatiated on how we must all strive to help liberate the ‘working class’. (How I hate that term – it implies that some of us aren’t workers, even though we may work fearfully hard on a biography of Marie Antoinette for absolutely years and years!!) When the aforementioned waiter comes over and asks whether everything was all right for us, Harold interjects – brilliantly – that it’s a damn fool question.

We end by ordering a bottle of Château d’Yquem on behalf of the sugar-plantation workers of East Timor.

LADY ANTONIA FRASER

Buy new fuckin house for a load of bread, but at least it has a brilliant swimmin pool for the car.

KEITH RICHARDS

Lady Diana Cooper was a lifelong beauty, famous for wearing impossibly large hats. I once asked her why she wore such big hats. Her reply was delightful.

In response to another question I put to her some years later, she told me that the answer was yes – but only in some respects!

I now forget what the question was. Dickie Mountbatten may have been in the room at the time. Dickie was very proud of his suede riding boots, and rightly so.

CLARISSA EDEN

The full history of Picasso and his vexed relations with boiled sweets must, alas, wait for a future volume, Picasso: The Too Good to Hurry Years. For the moment, let it suffice to say that he was rarely, if ever, observed sucking on a boiled sweet whilst painting, and since, when offered a Lemon Sherbet by the rich, spoiled homosexual narcissist Jean Cocteau, whose family money, incidentally, came from dry-cleaning, of all things, and whose coarse, unsophisticated father sported a singularly ill-fitting toupée, Picasso declined, saying thank you, but he had just had luncheon. Three days later he painted Woman in an Armchair, now hanging in the Musée Picasso, and some have detected a suggestion of Lemon Sherbet in the distinct yellow oval just above the woman’s right eyebrow.

JOHN RICHARDSON

The sight of a fresh spring daffodil bursting forth into the dappled sunlight fills me with disgust and despair. What sort of a world have we created for ourselves that allows these yellowy, sickly, foul-smelling, so-called ‘flowers’ to shove their misshapen and elongated necks through the Lord’s earth and then lets their vomit-coloured petals infringe the sanctity of our own old and very dear English countryside? What have we as a nation in, I fear, a deep and irreversible decline, busily wallowing in our post-colonial cowardice, puffing our chest up and then wheezing like some bronchial old colonel, what have we as a nation come to when we allow these daffodils, these malevolent globules of terminal jaundice, all yellow, yellow, yellow, to poke their noses through our ground and into our private lives?

DENNIS POTTER

Find corpse of chick in swimmin pool. Downer. Sell house.

KEITH RICHARDS

The anniversary: of the death of Iosif Stalin. Beast and Monster. Mass-murderer. What do we need to call him? What is it necessary to call him? Stalin is too simple: too simperbubble. In considering our selection of an appropriate word, I must first contend that the simple word ‘Stalin’ does nothing to convey the guy’s sheer horrid horridity. Let’s think again: let’s reinvent the language to form a noose around his head.

Mister Walrus Whiskers. That just about does the trick. I can candidly argue that, following a great deal of research, I know he wouldn’t want to be called Mr W-W: not one little bit. Or what about ‘Starling’? No way, José Feliciano. It sounds too like a bird: and a bird he was most certainly not.

The guy hated flying: hated it. Nor can we call him by his matey primonomenclaturalition, which is, of course, Iosif: Iosif is no mate of mine.

And why, pray, is it necessary to point out at this post-millennial juncture that Iosif Stalin – or Starling – is no mate of this fifty-two-year-old male novelist? Or, to put it another way: Novelist male old year fifty-two this of mate no is – Starling or – Stalin Iosif that juncture this at out point to necessary it is, pray, why and?

It can here be stated, boldly and fearlessly: Iosif Stalin was a very bad man. And my contention goes further, and can herein be tersely stated: he wasn’t nice at all.

MARTIN AMIS

Buy new house with lovely clean swimmin pool. Build new upstairs room for throwin TVs out of.

KEITH RICHARDS

Women divide into two categories. The kind who does what you tell her to. And the kind who doesn’t. Frankly, I’ve got a hell of a lot of time for them both. But one or two I can’t abide.

Not long ago, I had lunch with Mother Teresa at Wilton’s. She was no bigger than the partridge on my plate. In fact, I was half-tempted to pour my remaining gravy over her. I could have downed her in a couple of mouthfuls and still had room for a decent rice pudding.

God helps those who help themselves, I advised her. You’re frankly barking up the wrong tree grubbing around the backstreets of Calcutta. No one goes there. They’re not what I’d call serious players.

Sadly, she chose not to take my advice. Small wonder she died with barely a penny to her name. With her reputation and connections, she could have expected – what? – 250, 300K?

No one likes a little person, be it man or woman. If you’re going to be a hard-hitter, you’ve got to be over 5ft 2ins. And let’s not imagine that slogging around in a grubby habit gets you anywhere, either. For all her undoubted domestic virtues, Mother Teresa would never have made the position of Sub-Editor on a national newspaper.

MAX HASTINGS

The X-Factor. Don’t get me started! When those lovely young men come on stage in their tight little trousers and sing their hearts out for Sharon, my heart melts. I truly care about every single one of them, I really do, and the public senses that, and that’s why they love me.