It’s been said that the best revenge is living well. A hopeful and humanitarian manta, it would render most mafia and gangster movies redundant. It’s hard to imagine The Godfather as a story of Italian Americans pampering themselves with spa breaks and weekend ski trips as revenge for the assassination of one of “the family”.

For the rest of us who are sadly lacking in the freedom to indulge ourselves so easily when life gets tough, our simplest resource is the insult.

So if you want to sharpen your verbal machete, then its time to log onto todays site, which chronicles many of the finest insults in history. Some will be well known; what could beat Winston Churchills reply to a female admonisher accusing him of being drunk; “I’m drunk, and you’re ugly. But tomorrow I’ll be sober.”

Oscar Wilde has a deserved reputation as one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time, and a when a critic wrote what he considered to be a shabbily written review, he replied “the man who calls a spade a spade should be forced to use one”.

Then there is the cerebral insult, for the more discerning user. One Andrew Lang provided some academic riposte for all nerds with his put down of a fellow writer: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts… for support rather than illumination.”

Louis B Meyer may have been one of the great movie moguls but did not seem to be too loved; one anonymous “mourner” at his funeral is quoted as saying that “the only reason so many people showed up to his funeral was to make sure he was dead”.

Zsa Zsa Gabor was known for her rapier like wit and an insult from her was not something you would walk away from, such as when she said “Men are incomplete until they are married. Then they are finished.”

Imagine a slanging match with her and the legendary Groucho Marx, who might respond with one of his immortal zingers, such as “Women should be obscene and not heard.”

But the last word goes to the irascible W.C Fields. Explaining his penchant for the booze, he emitted the following oration that should hang over every bar counter in the world;

“A woman drove me to drink. I never got the chance to thank her.”

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