Asquith's scheme offered a pension to 75-year-olds and excluded vagrants, criminals, certified lunatics and anyone with an income of more than 10 shillings a week.
Her eyes hollow, her features etched by decades of substance abuse, she explained: 'The trouble with people is they don't necessarily look like lunatics.
It was a mortifying moment, made more mortifying because Robin Williams valiantly tried to salvage her mistake by leaping on stage and having the sort of multi-part conversation with himself that you'd normally expect to hear from red-eyed lunatics at bus stops at 3am.
In 1980, when President Carter offered to accept a few thousand Cuban refugees, Mr Castro answered with the Mariel boatlift, in which over 100,000 Cubans, a few of them lunatics and thugs, overwhelmed American shores.
Suspicion points to Osama bin Laden, but there are other possibilities, including, just conceivably, home-grown lunatics.
Even some pro-gun Republicans express private disdain for the give-not-an-inch tactics of the NRA, whose executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, says the correct response to Newtown is armed guards in every school, and doing more to track the "monsters" and "lunatics" whom he blames for the mass shootings.
Such operations are rarely, if ever, the work of lone lunatics.
The liberal lunatics Obama has appointed to the Federal Judiciary, including the two he has put on the Supreme Court are gone....What are the chances of success?...What are the chances of success?
Oman today is as orderly as Denmark, yet as recently as the 1960s lunatics were stumbling through the souks of its capital in leg-irons, and diminutive long-haired mountain men, naked to the waist and armed with axes, were roaming its remote interior.
And it wasn't just the lunatics, the Mail and others.
"The trouble with this business", says one studio executive ruefully, "is that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum".
