1. “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!”

“By God, sir, so you have!”

Henry William Paget, Earl of Uxbridge.

Reportedly in exchange with the Duke of Wellington.

In the last moments of the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, Paget’s right leg was struck by a cannon, necessitating its amputation.

The leg itself was later put on display as a tourist attraction, near the site of the battle in Waterloo.

Paget’s pluck almost certainly provided inspiration for the scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in which an English Army officer fighting in the Zulu War nonchalantly considers the leg that has just been bitten off by a tiger.

2. “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”

Pilot Eric Moody

On June 24, 1982, a British Airways Flight from London to Auckland found itself caught in a volcanic ash cloud whilst flying over Indonesia, causing the failure of all four of its engines. 41 year-old Pilot Eric Moody’s update to the plane’s passengers was instantly heralded as a ‘masterpiece’ of British understatement. The plane later landed safely.

3. “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Captain Lawrence Oates

On March 16, 1912, the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, was nearing its terminal stages.

Having reached the South Pole two months earlier, the men had found that they had been beaten by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. The surviving four-man team then became encircled by a blizzard in a small tent with diminishing supplies, as temperatures plummeted to -400C. Oates’s gallant, if ultimately futile, gesture, as recorded in Scott’s diary, was aimed at raising his comrades’ chances of survival. It is regularly cited as one of the noblest examples of self-sacrifice in British history. Oates’ body was never found.

4. “This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest…”

James Watson & Francis Crick

Taken from Watson & Crick’s classic paper on the double helical structure of DNA, published in Nature, No, 171, April 25, 1953.

The influence of Watson & Crick’s theory has since proven incalculable, spawning numerous scientific advances and breakthroughs related to human cell regeneration, genetic matter, and hereditary diseases.

5. “A bit sticky, things are pretty sticky down there.”

Brigadier Thomas Brodie

On April 22 1951, 650 soldiers of the 1stBattalion, the Gloucestershire Regiment, were confronted by as many as 10,000 Chinese soldiers, during the struggle to secure access across the Imjin River during the Korean War.

In the midst of the ensuing battle, with ammunition running perilously low, Brigadier Thomas Brodie took a radio call from an American Major-General, enquiring about the regiment’s condition.

Taking Brodie’s colossal British-style understatement literally, the American chose to defer sending relief until the following morning. Only forty of the Glosters survived to tell the tale.

6. “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.”

Sir Alexander Fleming

Fleming’s modest account of how, in 1928, he came to make one of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century: the discovery of penicillin.

7. “Much light will be thrown on man and his history.”

Sir Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin’s equally modest introduction to On the Origin of Species (1859), where he hints at the possible implications of his theory of natural selection.

Darwin’s theory is widely acknowledged as the foundation stone of all subsequent evolutionary biology.

8. “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”

Admiral Lord David Beatty

In response to two of his flotilla of ships exploding in alarmingly quick succession of each other. Quoted whilst in command of the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron at the Battle of Jutland in May, 1916.

9. “We are in a very tight corner.”

Robert Falcon Scott

Scott’s final letter to his wife dated March 12, 1912. Found in the tent where his body and those of his companions were found the following year. (See No. 4 for a fuller sense of the ‘tight corner’ in which Scott and his fellow explorers found themselves.)

10. “It’s a drag, isn’t it?”

Sir Paul McCartney

McCartney’s reported first response to the news that his former song-writing partner, John Lennon, had been murdered in New York on December 8, 1980.

11. “I told you I was ill.”

Spike Milligan

The words inscribed (in Gaelic) on the former Goon’s headstone at St Thomas’s Church in Winchelsea, East Sussex.

In 2012, Milligan’s laconic summation of his life was voted the ‘nation’s favourite epitaph’ in a poll carried out for Marie Curie Cancer Care.

12. “I just made a balls of it, old boy. That’s all there was to it.”

Sir Douglas Bader, RAF Pilot

Commenting on the ill-executed aerobatic manoeuvre he attempted shortly after take-off in December 1931, which resulted in a crash and the loss of both of his legs. Bader’s logbook records the incident thus: ‘Crashed slow-rolling near ground. Bad show.’

13. “It is not all pleasure, this exploration.”

Dr David Livingstone

The enigmatic Scottish missionary and explorer’s synopsis, in April 1873, of the final months of his twenty-year quest through central Africa to find the source of the Nile. By this stage, Livingstone was suffering from both malaria and internal bleeding due to dysentery. He died the following month.

14. “There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting.”

George Orwell

Recounting his experience of being shot in the throat whilst fighting against fascism in Spain, in 1937.

15. “Well, I’m still alive anyway.”

Queen Elizabeth II

The Queen’s response to being asked how she was by the Sinn Fein deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, during her visit to Northern Ireland on June 28, 2016. The trip was the Queen’s first public engagement since the UK had voted to leave the European Union five days earlier.

16. “We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.”

Sir Winston Churchill

From Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, delivered on May 13, 1940, in which he anticipated the all-encompassing nature of the struggle against Hitler and Nazism.

17. “Keep Calm and Carry On”

Ministry of Information

Produced during the build-up to the Second World War, in 1939, as a modest appeal to the British people to maintain their resolve in the face of impending crisis.

Since being ‘rediscovered’ in 2000, the phrase (as well as numerous variations on the theme) has come to be regarded as a key distillation of British national character.

18. “How different, how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.”

Anon.

The alleged response of a Victorian audience member to Sarah Bernhardt’s depiction of Cleopatra in Covent Garden in 1892. In the final scene of the play by the French dramatist, Victorien Sardou, Cleopatra, kills a slave, after he reports the defeat of her lover Mark Antony, and then commits suicide.

19. “I’m afraid there is no money.”

Liam Byrne

The notoriously unadorned message left by Labour’s outgoing chief secretary to the Treasury to his coalition successor, David Laws, in May 2015. At the time, British national debt was estimated at over £1.5 trillion. Byrne has since expressed his enduring regret over the note.

20. “This place has gone off terribly.”

Dame Edith Evans (attributed)

Kenneth Williams’ account, as told to Michael Parkinson, of the redoubtable Dame Edith Evans’ response to an aged hotel waiter’s breaking wind, as he bent down to retrieve a bottle of wine.