We are, as yet another American writer famously observed, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Douglass famously observed that slaves were doomed "to steal a little learning" from their masters.

Leo Durocher famously observed that Ott was too nice a guy, and his team would finish last.

Let them wear last year's styles, which no one will notice anyway because, as Germaine Greer famously observed, women in middle age become invisible.

In 1890, William James famously observed that "only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos."

Frank Lloyd Wright famously observed: "Architecture is the scientific art of making structure express ideas."

It was also in this story that Howard had one of his characters famously observe: 'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind.

Harold Wilson, who served as Britain's prime minister twice during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, famously observed that a week is a long time in politics.

(Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.")

(As George S. Kaufman famously observed, meetings were needed to take out all the improvements.)