Bathos

Charles: hard-hitting

Bathos is one way of being ironic. You set the listener up – then you pull away the chair just as he’s about to sit down.

[Prince Charles's staff] have helped His Royal Highness make some brilliant biscuits and some pretty hard hitting speeches about trees in recent years. Jewish Chronicle on the Prince's staff 28 Dec 07

a dish that is often compared to moussaka, though not always favourably (Web)

Alan Partridge ... whose vanity and stupidity were laced through by a core of real nastiness. Andrew Billen Times Oct 8 08

All the guides are very jolly in the worst sense of the word. Sybil Hart-Davis

Any further suggestions will be gratefully shredded.

Churchill called Stalin’s Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Kim Jong Il’s North Korea is much the same, minus the transparency.

conducting which invests Mozart’s score with all the scintillating joie de vivre of a Victorian hymnbook. Richard Morrison on Die Zauberflöte Times January 30, 2008

eight-legged bastards from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever’s nearest) Charlie Brooker on spiders Guardian Sept 3 07

Frankfurt – like Croydon, but less exciting.

His one liners kept on coming, unfortunately. Andrew Billen Times Nov 24 09

I hated the bar on sight. It saved time. Jay Rayner Sept 1 07

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty. Groucho Marx

I’d say “Call me old fashioned” (or Ishmael – your choice) whatnottocrochet website

If you’re not familiar with John Duncan Fergusson or the Scottish Colourists, this exhibition may strike you as quaintly parochial – full of the charm of the forgotten, but ultimately quite unimportant. Hephzibah Anderson, ES January 6, 2005

It is thought to taste like lobster – by those of a lively imagination. Mrs Dods’s cookery book 1829.

Life is so full of preposterous pretensions and lies and nonsense and fraud and chicanery and deceptions; there’s so much sick, strange, weird, neurotic behaviour, that it’s an infinitely interesting study. Jackie Mason

Mind you, there is nothing that can't be made worse by the addition of tinned carrots and cumin. commenter on guardian.co.uk (Followed up by: Any and all of the recipes on this website are clear evidence, as if it were needed, that we live in a cold unfeeling universe bereft of any kind of benevolent deity.)