Parting shot

In Competition No. 2767 you were invited to imagine what the ‘famous last words’ of any well-known real or fictional character, alive or dead, might be/have been.

Voltaire’s parting shot, when invited on his deathbed to forswear Satan, is purported to have been: ‘This is no time to make new enemies.’ Oscar Wilde’s final flourish varies depending on where you look but a strong contender is, ‘Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.’ Several of you offered counter-suggestions. Here’s Una McMorran’s: ‘That wallpaper — I’ve changed my mind!’

Richard Dawkins popped up time and again, and there was a great deal of further argy-bargy at Heaven’s gate courtesy of Angry Andrew Mitchell.

The prizewinners printed below are rewarded with £6 per parting shot printed.

Ernest Hemingway: ‘I’ll give it my best shot.’
Dalai Lama: ‘Here we go again.’
Roland Barthes: ‘I should have read the signs.’
G.M. Davis

Peter Mandelson: ‘I am not a quit…’
E.L. James: ‘Ow!’
Yul Brynner: ‘This is a very close shave.’
Bill Greenwell

Henry James: ‘I have the disagreeable feeling (or, rather, I should perhaps say, not so much a feeling as a presentiment) that I may conceivably be, as it were, not to put too fine a point on it —’
Socrates: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk …Now, if I could just write that down —’
Nicholas Holbrook

Anne Boleyn: ‘My last request? I’d like a nice juicy well-done chop.’
Mr Micawber: ‘I am convinced that something will turn up soon, although I fear that it may be my toes.’
Brian Allgar

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: ‘This a soup of wild mushrooms I gathered myself.’
John Whitworth

Revd W.A. Spooner: ‘I have a wondrous prevision of girly pates.’
Oscar Wilde: ‘I leave the field for others to compose my last words.’
W.J. Webster

Julius Caesar: ‘Oh shit, I could have sworn today was the sixteenth!’
Peter Mark Roget: ‘Alas, I am dying, expiring, perishing, giving up the ghost, being gathered to my fathers, going to meet my maker, passing away, (coll.) snuffing it, popping my clogs, kicking the bucket (see: late, deceased, defunct, extinct &c).’
Brian Murdoch

John Betjeman: ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on me!’
Alan Millard

Woody Allen: ‘I see my whole life flashing before me. Granted, it’s a seminal work, but would it have hurt to show me Ingmar Bergman’s instead?’
Adrian Fry

Harry Houdini: ‘That’s one box I won’t be leaving in a hurry.’
Brian Barclay

Norma Desmond: ‘Right, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my death mask now.’
Descartes: ‘Desisto cogitare ergo desisto esse.’
Noel Petty

Richard Dawkins: ‘Is anybody there?’
J. Seery

Molly Bloom: ‘Blazes!’
John O’Byrne

General Custer: ‘I think we’ve seen them off, lads.’
Max Ross

Nick Clegg: ‘In the broader interests of Eternity, I am willing to enter a coalition with God and Satan’
Barry Baldwin

Marcel Marceau: 🙁
Frank Osen

Philip Larkin: ‘I told you this would happen.’
D.A. Prince

J. Donne: ‘I wrote a lyric to the sun
And now the sun is done with Donne.’
Frank McDonald

No. 2770: the masque of art

In the mid-Eighties, the art critic Robert Hughes wrote ‘The SoHoiad’, after Pope’s ‘The Dunciad’, skewering the contemporary Manhattan art scene. You are invited to submit a response (16 lines only, I’m afraid), in the style of Alexander Pope, to the recently announced Turner Prize short list or to the contemporary art world in general. Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 October.