Bessie Bradock MP: 'Sir, you are drunk.'

Winston Churchill: 'Indeed, Madam, and you are ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober.'

'It's like being savaged by a dead sheep' – Labour's Denis Healey on being criticised by the Geoffrey Howe in 1978.

Barbara Cartland was asked by a journalist whether class divisions had narrowed in her lifetime. She said: 'Well of course they have, or I wouldn't be talking to YOU.'

Notes written about Fred Astaire's screen test for RKO Pictures in the early 1930s – 'can't act, can't sing, can dance a little'.

When Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe were filming Some Like It Hot, he said that kissing the actress was 'like kissing Hitler!'