swotty

Looking back at my school reports, I start off as quite a swotty kid, and then when I get to 12 or 13, my teachers start saying: "Lee has started to joke around a lot in class."

Portrait of the artist: Lee Mack, comedian Laura Barnett 2010

Newsweek looks like a college student desperately trying to fulfill the page requirement by using every trick in the word processing program to pad out a collection of underdeveloped ideas, banalities and clichés; by contrast, the Economist threads a line between sprezzatura (the prized nonchalance of an Oxbridge education) and the eager exam-taker who tries to keep writing after the bell has rung (the swotty reality).

Note To 'Newsweek': Jesus Sells 2010

I've taught at a pretty wide range of places: grad school uni where everyone shat ice cream, slacker slac, swotty slac, and my current institution, a diverse, proletarian place that I suspect is much like the big urban institution that employed you as a lecturer.

Ferule & Fescue Flavia 2010

Newsweek looks like a college student desperately trying to fulfill the page requirement by using every trick in the word processing program to pad out a collection of underdeveloped ideas, banalities and clichés; by contrast, the Economist threads a line between sprezzatura (the prized nonchalance of an Oxbridge education) and the eager exam-taker who tries to keep writing after the bell has rung (the swotty reality).

Note To 'Newsweek': Jesus Sells 2010

It takes a confident smarty-pants to wrap herself in such a swotty, sexless mantle.

Archive 2008-03-01 Jan 2008

How else are we to save modern democratic and civilised views if not for the spectator's secret equiuvalent of WMD the aforementioned champion of freedom the rather swotty looking Mealie Phillips.

On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with... 2007

To my surprise—a surprise I cannot justify—he chose to sit himself, very deliberately it seemed to me, between a Muslim gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and two children who were surely his, busy playing with their Quetzalcóatl keyrings, Rosetta Stone mouse mats, and countless other items of swotty tat bought from the museum shop.

Kalooki Nights Howard Jacobson 2006

Yes okay, chastise me now, I know it's swotty and geeky and I'm very strange ... but I really do find it all fascinating.

Directions kisobel 2003

Starting over in a place where no-one had ever known me as a bespectacled, swotty, shy teenager.

bristling 2005

I was always a swotty, straight-A student, fiercely competitive, constantly striving to be top of the class from pre-school to college.

malaise 2005