Since Kingsman, Egerton has put in skilful, solid supporting roles opposite Tom Hardy in Legend and Alicia Vikander in Testament of Youth.
Imagine your CV if you included all the emotional labour you do, on top of your paid, domestic and child-caring work: excellent diplomacy skills; ability to juggle a multitude of competing interests; multi-tasker; proven track record in skilful negotiating; can competently and consistently meet tight deadlines.
Over the course of Nixon's first term he acted as my partner, strong in crises, decisive in judgment, skilful in bureaucratic infighting... [But] I could not help noticing that Haig was implacable in squeezing to the sidelines potential competitors for my attention".
It's astonishing, not just in the skilful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility.
In less skilful hands, these shifts in perspective and style might feel jarring or unnerving, but O'Farrell's technical grasp of her material – and her characters – is so tight, so confident, that she moves the reader flawlessly from the perspective of a middle-aged alcoholic to a confused teenage girl.
"But for us to stand up on Friday, and for Joe Root to put in the extremely skilful performance that he did - in difficult circumstances and given the situation when he came in - it was exceptional.
Humans are remarkable in performing skilful arm movements for manipulation of objects in dynamic environments with the presence of unstable perturbations.
Some, I dare say, really are Freudian or Einsteinian in origin, or metaphysically intercultural, but they seem to me more like twists in a skilful thriller, closer to Le Carré than to James Joyce, and sometimes embroiled in melodrama – "the slime of plot and counterplot", as another of Durrell's characters defines it.
The answer lies in its skilful blending of two personality types, the romantics and the mechanics.
In less skilful hands than Seldon's, this could have been Tescolit.
