Friday night's live game, however, could hardly be more difficult.
The politics could hardly be more difficult after last week's sequence of misjudgments over non-dom status, the "backstabber" attack on Ed Miliband and what looked like the bizarre timing of the announcement of a new tax break for rich homeowners, the exemption of £1m family homes from inheritance tax.
A new book of documentary photographs, "Shelter," examines a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people living, off and on, at a homeless shelter in Hell's Kitchen — a group for whom growing up could hardly be more difficult.
However they ended up in the same group as Italy, who came out of the special pot, which meant the draw could hardly have been more difficult.
The increase could hardly have come at a more difficult time.
The advantage of a case study is that it is easier to plan and more realistic, but the disadvantage is that the results can hardly be generalized and are more difficult to interpret.
The most common method is to measure an individual's generic skills, for example in cognitive tests or in the OECD's IALS and PIAAC literacy surveys, whereas job-specific skill requirements are hardly used because they are far more difficult to measure.
Although MacGregor's arrival is being awaited with anticipation, he could hardly be joining the museum at a more difficult moment.
But the answer the court gave was hardly definitive, leaving for another day some of the more difficult issues of application.
At one point, she passed a chair that was more or less identical to her ladyfinger chair, hardly blinking, except to note that originality was becoming more difficult than ever.
