“Under what name did the Irish painter Jack Yeats work as a cartoonist?” Answer: “W Bird”. And Kenneth Bird, by coincidence, was the real name of “Fougasse”, the only cartoonist ever to edit Punch.A reader writes: Dear Mr Kington, Is this article an elaborate way of mentioning all the artist/writers you can think of, thus preventing further people or even American critics in St Albans writing in to outwit you? Miles Kington writes: I would say that summed up the position very succinctly.A reader writes: Fair enough … Even if Spike could hardly draw to save his life, it never stopped him illustrating his own books.And then my glumness was increased by the thought of Max Beerbohm, “the incomparable Max”, who wrote as well as he drew and vice versa. He will be in the book too.”One candidate for inclusion would be Jack Butler Yeats, the brother of WB Yeats. People like Willie Wilde, brother of the more famous Oscar.”"You are of course the brother of the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, are you not?”"Yes. But was he primarily a writer or artist? Who can tell where one stops and the other starts? Then I got an e-mail from an American critic in St Albans who said simply: “Spike Milligan?” and I thought glumly that he too was right.

That probably explains why so many cartoons just before and after 1900 are so laboured. It seems hard to imagine now, but Victorian cartoons in Punch often included elaborate stage directions, along the lines of: “Young Blood (entering shop to purchase umbrella in case rain gets on his cravat): ‘I say, have you got any etc etc …’” and then launched into lines of dialogue, forced on the long-suffering cartoonist by the would-be funny writer.(Very occasionally the dialogue was actually quite funny, as in the ancient exchange between two surgeons: “What did you operate on old Jones for?” “A hundred pounds.” “No, I mean – what had he got?” “A hundred pounds.”)But doubts about my thesis began to creep in when I woke in the middle of the night after writing the piece and thought to myself: “Mervyn Peake!” There was a man who wrote and drew. I might have mentioned SJ Perelman as well, because in his early days he did (albeit mistakenly) fancy himself as a drawer of gags. In fact, I think it was Perelman who drew a cartoon of a patient rushing into a doctor’s surgery and exclaiming: “Doctor – I’ve got Bright’s Disease and he’s got mine!”That’s a writer’s joke if I ever saw one – a verbal gag and nothing visual about it at all. But then, I believe there was a time when writers supplied the jokes to cartoonists and got them drawn to order. But I don’t think the Labour leadership has yet realised what a visceral reaction many women have to Campbell, Reid, Charles Clarke and John Prescott, all of whom display a pugilistic form of masculinity that seems reluctant to exit the studio until their opponent is stretched out on the floor.Alan Milburn, Labour’s election supremo, is so arrogant and inflexible that I have to leave the room when he comes on the Today programme.In the last few days, as the phoney election period draws to an end, I’ve heard women express anger and distrust towards the Labour leadership and its negative campaigning over and over again.

The advent of DVD technology is changing film-making aesthetics.
Ten minutes and 25 seconds exactly into The Incredibles, there is a curious sequence. It consists of that old favourite of Hollywood sensational dramas, the whirling newspaper headline. There are three front pages of newspapers, each with a different story about legal challenges to different superheroes. The sequence lasts three seconds.By freeze-framing the DVD, I counted 50 legible words, with pastiche newspaper photographs to take in as well. They are witty and amusing headlines, which someone has written quite carefully Very few people could absorb much of it in three seconds. There are attested cases of readers, many of them deaf, who can read at a rate of 1,000 words a minute.

There is a gentleman in America who claims to be able to read 25,000 words a minute, which I frankly don’t believe could be reading in any meaningful sense; that amounts to claiming to be able to read Bleak House in 16 minutes. But such cases are extremely rare.In short, it is a sequence that can properly be appreciated only at leisure, at home. Specifically, this means via DVD technology, rather than the old video machine. There is quite an amusing joke in the film, in which the super-fast son’s movements can’t be caught even on slow-motion video; the owner of a DVD machine is mildly flattered.The film invites you to slow it down, to admire its exquisite detail.

But you can also move sideways, as it were, to explore how the film was made – the out-takes are not jokey ones, but glitches in computer programs that you would probably have to be an animator to understand. There is a commentary, sequences lost at the editing process, as well as two fully realised amusing spin-offs. The film, as it exists on DVD, is a more complete experience than the movie in the theatre; lower impact, but more intricately satisfying.Many film-lovers have fallen in love with DVDs for the simple reason that they give a film an index like a book. Often, one loves a particular film chiefly for a particular sequence, and the DVD gives the viewer the opportunity to find and watch that sequence with ease. It is a delight, say, to be able to find the great drunk scene in All About Eve, or the delirious hula-hoop sequence in The Hudsucker Proxy, or a favourite song in Gypsy, or the Anita Ekberg passage in La Dolce Vita without faffing about with forward-wind buttons and timings.