Dear Bill

So, I was on Wikipedia seeing if this new film called Scoop is based on the Waugh novel (it isn't, but an adaptation was made in 1987, it turns out) and then got distracted by reading the entry for the book itself. There I found this wonderfully deadpan statement:

"Waugh based his hapless protagonist, William Boot, on Bill Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22 with two tons of luggage."

Scoop, by the way, is an excellent novel and everyone should read it.
Although I must confess to not being familiar with the phrase "in a cleft stick" when I first read it and so had to look it up in a dictionary before getting the joke.