When his letters to her were purloined by her then-husband, it isn't pillow talk but spiteful remarks about the Bishop of Exeter he fears will be leaked.
Page's declaration shouldn't be news, but when I read the spiteful remarks in response to the speech – made to people who work with LGBT teens, many of whom experience mental and physical abuse as a result of their sexuality – my heart sank.
Don't come down to your friends level and brag or make spiteful remarks to her, she'll just do it back.
Spiteful comment pieces will only be the first stone thrown.
But the role mostly consists of nervously running his fingers through his (ample) hair, running interference among his anxious singers and making spiteful or adulatory remarks about his rivals Donizetti and Rossini.
The last trick, the ultimate strategy, is, when you see that your opponent is winning, to 'become personal', to 'leave the subject altogether and turn your attack to his person by remarks of an offensive and spiteful character'.
As Nancy Pelosi remarked in the New York Times, "It is a spiteful act of vast, pointless sabotage leveled at working families and the middle class in every corner of America".
Children were to be dutiful; as the Celtic and English monks Columban and Bede were to remark, "A child does not remain angry, he is not spiteful, does not contradict the professors, but receives with confidence what is taught him".
Mr Sarkozy's reported remarks were later taken up by Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, who described them as "spiteful".
