Sir Humphrey Appleby

Sir Humphrey Appleby is the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Administrative Affairs, the mandarin who actually runs things while elected ministers come and go. He greets his new minister, Jim Hacker, with impeccable courtesy and a private determination that nothing whatsoever will change. His weapon is language: circular, exquisite, designed to bury decisions rather than make them.

Hawthorne turns bureaucratic obstruction into an art form, delivering sentences of magnificent, self-cancelling complexity with a straight face and a twinkle just behind it. The writing trusts you to follow labyrinthine logic to its absurd conclusion, and Hawthorne's genius is timing: the pause before the killer clause is where the real joke lives.