A miserable waste of space

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes.