Once a lady collided with Dorothy Parker in the doorway. She gallantly stepped back and motioned to Miss Parker to get through first saying, "Age before beauty." To which Miss Parker replied, "Pearls before swines," and moved off.

She was equally adept in verse. She proved her skill through the most popular couplet, Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses. Her portrait of George Sand is a gem of a joke. It reads: What time the gifted lady took away from paper, pen and book,/ She spent in amorous dalliance/ (They do those things so well in France).

She had this to say about Carlyle:Carlyle combined the lit’ry life/ With throwing tea cups at his wife,/ Remarking, rather testily,/ "Oh, stop your dodging, Mrs Carlyle.

Rightly did the gossip columns recognise her as "the wittiest woman of her generation."

Can we ignore the worth of the sharp wit of Alice Roosevelt Longworth! Her responses were instantaneous, effortlessly delivered, laden with punch lines. Once President Lyndon Johnson complained to her that ‘her wide-rimmed hat made her hard to kiss.’ She spat back, "That’s why I wear it." She was equally nasty at the nomination of Thomas E. Dewey as the Republican candidate: "How can the Republican Party nominate a man who looks like a bridegroom on a wedding cake."

Mae West had an offbeat sense of acerbity. She knew that "a man in the house is worth two in the street". She saw sex as "an emotion in motion". She described one of her acquaintances "as the kind of man who picks his friends — to pieces." Focussing on the lust of men, she joked, "Given a man a free hand; and he’ll run it all over you."

When Jimmy Carter averred that his lust was in his heart, Shirley Maclaine rued, "He says his lust is in his heart, but I hope it’s a little lower."

The male seems to be in the firing range of most quips by women. American writer Helen Rowland pertinently observed: "Before marriage, a man will lie awake all night thinking about something you said. After marriage he will fall asleep before you have finished saying it." She had the temerity to define a husband as "what’s left of a man after the nerve had been extracted." She defined the safety rule for marriages: "Never trust a husband too far; nor a bachelor too near." She commented, with tongue-in-cheek insouciance: "In olden times, sacrifices were made at the altar, a practice that still continues."

Natalie Wood, after close contact with lots of men quipped, "The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby." Clare Booth Luce knew that "there is nothing like a good dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his wife". Liz Taylor claimed: "I’ve only slept with the men I’ve been married to." How many women can make that claim?" Zsa Zsa Gabor said that a woman must be good at holding her husband’s attention and observed: "Husbands are like fires — they go out when unattended."

Constance Bennett described Marlyn Monroe thus: "There’s a broad with her future behind her." Jan Kerr took the catchy cliche about beauty being skin-deep and snapped: "I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want? An adorable pancreas?" Once Noel Coward greeted Edna Ferber, American writer, with the words, "Edna, my dear, you look almost like a man."She gave it back in equal measure with the sharp retort: "So do you."

Moving to the Continent, we find the best of wits in Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman to enter Parliament. The rest of the MPs felt she had broken into a male bastion. Winston Churchill was one of them. Nancy Astor noticed the mood and asked him the reason for their discomfort. Churchill said that on her coming to the House, he felt as if she had entered his bathroom when he had only a sponge to defend himself with. Pat came her devastating reply: "But, Mr Churchill, you are not handsome enough to have worries of that kind." Once a heckler tried to rattle her, while she was addressing a public meeting, with the words: "Pray, tell me Madam, how many toes has a pig?" She didn’t even take a second to tell him, "Why don’t you take off your shoe and count?" She felt irked that the Press gave more space to crimes than to the cause of women and said, at a press conference, "I think we shall have to murder our husbands to get in the papers."

Margaret Asquith rapped Lloyd George saying, "He can’t see a belt without hitting blow it." She described Lord Birkenhead as "very clever, but his brains go to his head". Virginia Woolf gave the acronym BBC a new interpretation, called it the Betwixt and Between Corporation.

Emil Kotky had a sizzling comment for every occasion. Her pithy description of some of her acquaintances whip up laughter. She described a man whose health was seriously damaged by drinks thus: "He drank so much to other people’s health that he ruined his own." She described another man thus: "All that was left of his hair was his comb." A third man floundered when the lady painted him as one "trying to gather his thoughts together for a long time, but the gathering never took place." She caricatured a man for intellectual pretensions, "A thought entered his head, but nobody was at home." A man who always hedged his options found himself at the receiving end when she noted: "He took no responsibility for anything. Even when saying the world moved round its axis, he would add, ‘according to Copernicus.’ "

Moving Eastward, we spot the wit of Golda Meir. On becoming the Prime Minister of Israel, at the age of 70, she joked: "I became the Prime Minister the same way my milkman became an officer in command of an outpost of Mount Hermon. Neither of us had any particular relish for the job, but we both did as well as we could." Once the Cabinet discussed reports of increased attacks on women. One minister proposed a curfew, said women should be confined to their homes after dark. Gold Meir scowled: "It’s the men who are attacking the women. if we have a curfew it will have to be the men who stay at home, not the women."

Nearer home, we find many examples of sharp wits. Think of Sarojini Naidu, flashing her wit and taking on Rajaji, the then Governor-General of India, comes to mind. Rajaji was taking rounds of the palatial Viceregal lodge, (Now called Rashtrapati Bhavan). He took her to the bedroom, showed her the huge bed that he would have to occupy by himself. "Now, now, Rajaji, I have helped you in many difficult situations, but this is one in which I cannot accommodate you."

Or remember Mrs Indira Gandhi. In 1983, Mrs Gandhi met the Press soon after the conclusion of the Commonwealth Summit. A correspondent from the West asked her whether she would welcome the election of Jessie Jackson, a Black, as the next President of the United States. She ducked the issue, using the witty question, "Would not that amount to interference in the internal affairs of another country?" The correspondent did not leave her at that. He asked, "Does it mean that you don’t favour election of a Black as President of the US?" Mrs Gandhi laughed, "It’s like the good old question: ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ "There it is, in black and white. Wit is not the monopoly of men. It is something that shows no gender bias. One either has it; or doesn’t have it.