Life & Wisdom Quote by Margot Asquith

It lands like a compliment, then quietly twists the knife. Margot Asquith’s line about Lord Birkenhead flatters his intelligence while implying the very thing that makes him formidable also makes him insufferable. “Very clever” is the public-facing concession; “sometimes his brains go to his head” is the drawing-room verdict: brilliance curdled into ego, intellect weaponized as self-regard.

The wording matters. “Brains” is blunt, almost biological, a physical substance that can swell and distort. Asquith turns cleverness into a bodily hazard, like champagne or altitude sickness: too much of it and you start mistaking your own altitude for moral authority. “Go to his head” borrows the idiom usually reserved for drink, linking mental prowess to intoxication. It suggests Birkenhead isn’t merely arrogant; he’s drunk on the sensation of being the smartest man in the room.

The subtext is class and power, too. Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) rose from relatively modest origins to the highest legal office, famous for courtroom dominance and political swagger. Asquith, a premier minister’s wife and a consummate salon operator, speaks from a culture where wit is a form of governance: reputations are managed with a sentence, and overreach gets clipped with an epigram. The intent isn’t to dismantle Birkenhead so much as to place him back in proportion. It’s a warning disguised as praise: your gift is real, but you’re letting it turn into theater. In Asquith’s world, that’s the cardinal sin - not being clever, but being caught enjoying it too much.