He bracketed him together with Boris Johnson, George Galloway and the Greens' Caroline Lucas.
He bracketed the California trip with quail hunting in Texas last weekend and a planned appearance presiding over the Wyoming Legislature on Monday.
That is only partly because Jim O'Neill, an economist at Goldman Sachs, did it a huge favour when in 2001 he bracketed it together with Russia, India and China as one of the BRICs which would dominate world economic growth over the coming decades.
It also published his earliest "signature" pieces, written while he was assistant news editor of the Architects' Journal, a situation that forced him to adopt the pseudonym of "Rupert Spade"- a character he bracketed somewhere between Sam Spade and Rupert of the Rhine.
Though he bracketted it inside a robust attack on the home secretary David Blunkett's "authoritarian tendency" Mr Hughes stressed: "If offences are committed, the courts should ask this question first: is this a violent or non-violent offence?
(At least he bracketed a suggested correction rather than a humiliating [sic]. In return, I have not sic'd his use of "was differentiating" when the contrary-to-fact subjunctive called for were).
And he bracketed the concert with joyfully Latin pop: opening the show with towering drums onstage and kinetic Afro-Caribbean rhythms and beginning the final song, "Tu Recuerdo" ("Your Memory"), as a Puerto Rican aguinaldo, gently plucked on the rural miniguitar called a cuatro.
He says, "Brackets, laughs bitterly" to convey some degree of irony or self-loathing.
But if this sounds rather pensive, fear not: he will bracket these works with performances of two high-spirited and witty Haydn sonatas.
He was bracketed in Leipzig with the now far more renowned symbolist painter and sculptor Max Klinger, and compared to the much grander Franz von Lenbach of Munich.
