Christmas Every Day

Make sure you have four good friends: one more handsome, one uglier, one richer and one poorer than yourself. That way you experience perfect contentment and humility.

— Nicholas Coleridge

Nigel Nicolson, MP in the Fifties, said of public speaking: “Always know exactly what you are going to say. Never know how you are going to say it.”

All the best advice I received was from my father, and I even took some of it. My favourite is: “The man who never made a mistake never made anything.”

— Peter Barron

The best piece of advice I ever received was from my mother: “If you want to be happily married, marry a happy person.” I am glad to say I took her at her word.

— Julian Fellowes

Passed on to me by the playwright John Mortimer, who received it in turn from his father: “All advice is useless.”

— Richard Madeley

My mother always said: “It is never your extravagances you regret, it is only your economies.”

— Fern Britton

We shall spend the month of March dispensing tidbits of advice from the great and the near-great. First up is Lady Antonia Fraser:

A very old Marquess once said to me: “No gentleman is ever rude by mistake.” This seems to me a profound observation about the need for courtesy and consideration to all people at all times. Unless, of course, you have good reason for anger, in which case go for it.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects. 

— Attributed to Herodotus but falsely put on his lips by Mark Twain

“Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.” 

— Arnold Toynbee