I used to loathe its happy-clappy gaucheness, but now I quite like it, despite knowing that there's nothing gauche about its indomitable owner.
Other than depictions of the nativity, there is no work of art that has furnished society so comprehensively with what we now think of as Christmas: the generosity of spirit, the personal rebirth through reflection, the gaucheness and sentimentality, even saying "Merry Christmas" to one another.
Is social gaucheness a particular Miliband trait?
More broadly, she argues, much of China's perceived prickliness is actually a gaucheness at being thrust into new global leadership roles.
Their main defects are shapelessness, an overinsistent moralizing, occasional gaucheness, and naiveté.
How could someone once so brilliantly funny not realise the gaucheness of those remarks?
There may be very little of the actual Crudup visible on screen (those glowing copper-sulphate pecs surely aren't his), but, via Manhattan's blank visage, he makes this hugely improbable figure a touching and tragic enigma – Shiva the destroyer with Buddha's smile and residual traces of boffin gaucheness.
The slight gaucheness, even naivety, of the rendering of the scene also puts us in mind of Stanley Spencer, and the way his figures relate to the landscape near Cookham.
Sadly, it's done as a duet with Antony Hegarty, whose vocal mannerisms are, if anything, more idiosyncratic and peculiar than Marianne's; together, they clash like an iceberg scraping away at the hull of the Titanic, A late attempt to salvage the track by funking things up only makes matters worse, compounding its lack of grace with charmless gaucheness.
Only now do we get the angry Tory politics; the author's detestation of Sir Laurence Olivier ("What a coarse creature he is!"); the gaucheness of one British ambassador's wife ("When she produced her own paintings one realised the full impact of her lack of taste").
By custom, they have been stacked with beautiful people, and tricked out with beautiful objects, but the outcome was often unlovely to behold, with a gaucheness that ran far deeper than Roger Moore's safari suit.
