Samuel Beckett, thanks to the line containing the words "fail better", is enjoying a new and unlikely half-life among captains of industry, tennis players and motivators (amusingly, Richard Branson, acknowledging the quote's primary authorship, said "from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly").
The censors' original 43 "grounds for deletion" list from 1916 included several amusingly old-fashioned points, including scenes of "vitriol throwing", "scenes laid in disorderly houses", "vulgar accessories in the staging", "indecorous dancing" and scenes likely to "bring into disrepute British prestige in the Empire".
Nor, amusingly, do they prevent Strauss offering Pietersen a role as an adviser on one-day cricket.
New arrivals include Kristen Schaal, who played the amusingly unhinged groupie in Flight of the Conchords.
Simon Hoggart amusingly recalled the buttoned-up world of Clement Attlee.
Past the palace's monumental marble staircase, the atmosphere within the 15 royal chambers does feel amusingly electric.
He amusingly called a young voter who asked about his age a "little jerk".
Amusingly and worryingly, a recent survey by Royal Bank of Scotland found that 90% of investors thought their understanding of cocos was better than average.
Even he had to admit it was ingenious.Abbie Hoffman, a 1960s radical-cum-trickster, said most pranks fell into one of three categories: "good" pranks were amusingly satirical, "bad" ones gratuitously vindictive, and "neutral" ones surreal and soft on the victim (if there was one).
FOR 26 years before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was fired up in 2009 at CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, the discipline was dominated by the Tevatron, the pride and joy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, on the outskirts of Chicago (and, amusingly, next door to Geneva, Illinois).
There was certainly anger: shareholders queued up to tell the board that they had paid out too much in bonuses, not enough in dividends.Alison Carnwath, the head of the bank's remuneration committee, was heckled, at times amusingly.
