would take the average couple three and a half years to try every one of the 529 positions described in the book.
Observer
The British Museum’s Secretum is a collection of Victorian erotica kept behind locked doors. It represents a magnificent obsession with male genitalia. About 30 people a year apply for permission to view. The majority are women.
Daily Mail
John Mortimer remembers ‘a terrible moment in my life when, at lunch with a girlfriend and her mother, I misjudged the legs under the table and started to caress the mother’.
Daily Mail
Retired agony aunt Claire Rayner says a memorable problem letter she received read: ‘My husband won’t make love to me in any way, even a kiss or a cuddle. His father’s the same’.
Daily Mail
CHAPTER 8
POLITICS
Harold Wilson liked to say of Tony Benn: ‘He immatures with age’…
Prime Minister Gordon Brown lost an eye as a 16-year-old rugby player and a rude MP told him: ‘I can always tell which is your false eye. It’s the one with warmth in it.’
Sun
Julian Glover’s review of Alistair Campbell’s diary says that the 750-page book ‘can be boiled down to a single sentence: “How me and Tony stuffed the media and changed the world”’.
Guardian
In the week when the Scottish National Party did rather well in the May 2007 elections Andrew Gimson of the Daily Telegraph produced a quote from a Scottish voter on SNP leader Alex Salmond: ‘That man is so pleased with himself, he’d drink his own bath water.’
Simon Hoggart commented: ‘Possibly that is a cleaned up version of something similar but more offensive.’
Guardian
A rare piece of wit in the House of Lords:
Lord Walpole asked Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman: ‘I have a daughter in the Foreign Office. Can the FO teach her to speak English now that she has come back after four years in New York?’
Lord Triesman: ‘Some tasks may be beyond even the Foreign Office.’
Ephraim Hardcastle, Daily Mail
Matt Faber’s son was surprised to learn that Margaret Thatcher was elected three times.
‘But, didn’t everybody hate her?’ he asked.
‘Well, certainly, many had that view of her, but as many felt as passionately the other way’, replied dad.
‘Ah,’ said the boy. ‘Like Marmite.’
Guardian Weekly
Under the headline O NE M ILLION I MMIGRANTS G RANTED B RITISH C ITIZENSHIP IN P AST D ECADE . The Times reported in May 2007 that among the main occupations given by Romanians and Bulgarians was Circus Artiste.
The Times
This is said to be Gordon Brown’s favourite joke (he has told it nine times in public in less than a year):
Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan was due to meet Olof Palme, then the Swedish prime minister. Mr Reagan was aware that Palme came from somewhere in Europe and not too far from Russia and asked his advisers:
‘Isn’t this man a Communist?’
‘No Mr President, he’s an anti Communist.’
‘I don’t care what kind of a Communist he is.’
Daily Telegraph
Some samples of ‘vexatious requests’ made under the Freedom of Information Act:
The cost of the Prime Minister’s make-up.
The number of eligible bachelors in the Hampshire police force.
Amount spent on Ferrero Rocher chocolates by the Foreign Office.
The number of sex acts perpetrated on Welsh sheep.
The Times
Harold Wilson liked to say of Tony Benn that ‘he immatures with age’.
Guardian
The suggestion that retiring PM Tony Blair might be given a bicycle as a leaving present should be resisted, writes David Thorpe, of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. As a young neighbour of theirs near Durham in the 1960s he was a nuisance riding around ringing his bell.
The Times
Simon Hoggart writes: You could fill a book with quotes wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill. There’s no record of the reported occasion when Labour MP Bessie Braddock accused Winston of being drunk and his supposed reply was: ‘And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning.’
Daily
Observer
The British Museum’s Secretum is a collection of Victorian erotica kept behind locked doors. It represents a magnificent obsession with male genitalia. About 30 people a year apply for permission to view. The majority are women.
Daily Mail
John Mortimer remembers ‘a terrible moment in my life when, at lunch with a girlfriend and her mother, I misjudged the legs under the table and started to caress the mother’.
Daily Mail
Retired agony aunt Claire Rayner says a memorable problem letter she received read: ‘My husband won’t make love to me in any way, even a kiss or a cuddle. His father’s the same’.
Daily Mail
CHAPTER 8
POLITICS
Harold Wilson liked to say of Tony Benn: ‘He immatures with age’…
Prime Minister Gordon Brown lost an eye as a 16-year-old rugby player and a rude MP told him: ‘I can always tell which is your false eye. It’s the one with warmth in it.’
Sun
Julian Glover’s review of Alistair Campbell’s diary says that the 750-page book ‘can be boiled down to a single sentence: “How me and Tony stuffed the media and changed the world”’.
Guardian
In the week when the Scottish National Party did rather well in the May 2007 elections Andrew Gimson of the Daily Telegraph produced a quote from a Scottish voter on SNP leader Alex Salmond: ‘That man is so pleased with himself, he’d drink his own bath water.’
Simon Hoggart commented: ‘Possibly that is a cleaned up version of something similar but more offensive.’
Guardian
A rare piece of wit in the House of Lords:
Lord Walpole asked Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman: ‘I have a daughter in the Foreign Office. Can the FO teach her to speak English now that she has come back after four years in New York?’
Lord Triesman: ‘Some tasks may be beyond even the Foreign Office.’
Ephraim Hardcastle, Daily Mail
Matt Faber’s son was surprised to learn that Margaret Thatcher was elected three times.
‘But, didn’t everybody hate her?’ he asked.
‘Well, certainly, many had that view of her, but as many felt as passionately the other way’, replied dad.
‘Ah,’ said the boy. ‘Like Marmite.’
Guardian Weekly
Under the headline O NE M ILLION I MMIGRANTS G RANTED B RITISH C ITIZENSHIP IN P AST D ECADE . The Times reported in May 2007 that among the main occupations given by Romanians and Bulgarians was Circus Artiste.
The Times
This is said to be Gordon Brown’s favourite joke (he has told it nine times in public in less than a year):
Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan was due to meet Olof Palme, then the Swedish prime minister. Mr Reagan was aware that Palme came from somewhere in Europe and not too far from Russia and asked his advisers:
‘Isn’t this man a Communist?’
‘No Mr President, he’s an anti Communist.’
‘I don’t care what kind of a Communist he is.’
Daily Telegraph
Some samples of ‘vexatious requests’ made under the Freedom of Information Act:
The cost of the Prime Minister’s make-up.
The number of eligible bachelors in the Hampshire police force.
Amount spent on Ferrero Rocher chocolates by the Foreign Office.
The number of sex acts perpetrated on Welsh sheep.
The Times
Harold Wilson liked to say of Tony Benn that ‘he immatures with age’.
Guardian
The suggestion that retiring PM Tony Blair might be given a bicycle as a leaving present should be resisted, writes David Thorpe, of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. As a young neighbour of theirs near Durham in the 1960s he was a nuisance riding around ringing his bell.
The Times
Simon Hoggart writes: You could fill a book with quotes wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill. There’s no record of the reported occasion when Labour MP Bessie Braddock accused Winston of being drunk and his supposed reply was: ‘And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning.’
Daily
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