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I'll finish with a comment on a book.  Its "Playing to the Gallery" by Grayson Perry.  He won the Turner Prize, so has serious art credentials.  He describes himself as an Essex transvestite potter and has a teddy bear called Alan Measles.  It is very very funny and also well written: this probably explains why his gig presenting the Reith lectures got the biggest audience ever.  Near the end of the book he drops this call:
"I have a particularly acute allergy to cliches because my mother ran off with the milkman"
which gives a hint of his style.

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