The habit of theatre managers of extracting tiny nuggets of hope from otherwise dreadful notices is probably too much of a cliche to be worth a mention. You know, when Boot of The Beast writes

The prospect of a revival of Noel Coward’s Cavalcade filled me with breathless excitement, but the pathetic excuse offered at the Pyrexicon Theatre last night was no more exciting than a west Tuesday afternoon in Romford…

you’ll see posters outside the theatre next day proclaiming

Breathless Excitement – Daily Beast

Many years ago when the world was young I wrote a book suggesting that the traditional, narrative mode of evolutionary story-telling had been surpassed by the new, rigorous and above all scientific discipline of cladistics.

I was warned that when I said that to place a lot of fossils in a line and draw arrows between them is no way to create a credible model of evolution, I’d be jumped on by creationist quote-miners, and so I was. My apparent support for creationist rubbish is all over the web like a cheap suit.

My response was (and still is) is that creationists are so desperate to acquire credibility that they’d twist one’s words any old how, whatever you said – and that I wasn’t about to modify my pronouncements to accommodate this particular bunch of bozos. That my stance is justified comes from the fact that no matter how loudly I state that creationism is a consignment of geriatric shoe manufacturers, they’ll still rip me off for quotes just the same. They just want to be close to me, I guess… maybe I should turn my charisma down a notch, and they’ll just drift away.

I had thought that people who write marketing and advertising blurb for publishers occupied a rung on the scala naturae slightly above creationists. This may be true, but whatever the height of their perch, it is still below that of estate agents, as judged from this flyer from Oxford University Press promoting James D. Watson’s latest effusion, Avoid Boring People, in which you’ll see this puff:

’...an engaging writer…’ – Dr Henry Gee, Focus

Well, it’s quite true that I reviewed the book for Focus, and also true that I said Watson was ‘an engaging writer’, because he is.

But it’s very annoying, and, indeed, quite offensive, to see this highly selective quote plastered all over the web in support of this book, when the rest of my review made it clear, given the circumlocutions required when one is offered a lead review slot and one doesn’t want to cast too much of a downer on things, that, in my humble opinion, Avoid Boring People by James D Watson is an arrogant, illiterate, narcissistic, pompous, pustulocrustaceous, shrill, noisome, vile, risible and above all steamingly feculent carcass of a book whose purpose can only be to distract me from from more worthwhile pursuits such as listening to my collection of tapes of kittens being impaled on red-hot skewers. Now, I’d like to see OUP put that in their publicity.