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If Transcription were a le Carré novel, the main character would be the fake Gestapo agent, Godfrey Toby, a reputed mastermind who cuts a disappointingly “unassuming, Pooterish figure” in the young Juliet’s eyes.

At the time, I found it comical that his bodyguard would arrive the next morning bearing croissants; such a pastry delivery service seemed a bit Pooterish to me, and therefore distinctly unsexy.

“I do not believe that your accusations of plagiarism regarding Laventille are justified. But I am not prepared to have this beautiful and important book dirtied by the grubby little fingers of Pooterish readers.”

Merton has not gone the way of other life-writing comedians by trying to tell his stand-up routine on the page, and his book is mostly the better for it. His prose style is no more than serviceable, with some slightly Pooterish asides on postwar British cultural history – "The LP with its much larger size enjoyed a higher status than the CD initially" – and there is none of the simulated indignation and mock bewilderment that have turned his panel-show appearances into an art form.

Mr. Gill — a Scotsman who has spent much of his life in exile in the hostile environs of London — denounced the English in that volume as a Pooterish lot, afflicted by repressed emotions and an “earthbound pedantic spirituality” and still haunted by its loss of their Empire.