The president-elect might hate Hollywood but he just pulled a classic old Hollywood move: like a glowering, cigar-chewing studio head, Donald Trump has hired his son-in-law. Jared Kushner, married to Ivanka Trump, has been appointed his senior adviser, and transition officials have solemnly announced that they have received “legal counsel” to ensure that this does not violate US anti-nepotism law.

Perhaps the counsel amounted to a careful, syllable-by-syllable scrutiny of Richard Nixon’s classic maxim: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” In 1933 the MGM studio chief Louis B Mayer hired his son-in-law David O Selznick to run a production unit. Selznick was of course very talented, but his elevation inspired the eternal Hollywood gag: The Son-in-Law Also Rises.

The favoured relative inspires suspicion and resentment in the hearts of colleagues – and finally, mysteriously, in the heart of the aged patron himself. Perhaps Kushner pondered the career of Count Galeazzo Ciano, who married Mussolini’s daughter Edda, became foreign minister, but was eventually imprisoned by his father-in-law and sentenced to death by firing squad. It is said that when Mayer’s business partner Samuel Goldwyn met Albert Einstein, he told him: “I got a theory about relatives, too. Don’t hire them.”

The attitude of gratitude

I have in the past reflected on the phenomenon of the “thankbrag”, a cousin to the humblebrag, generally deployed on social media in a spirit of effusive humility. (“Thanks so much to everyone for all your lovely comments about my recent article”; “Thanks so much to the fans whose support inspires me and have put my new album/film/TV show/dating app straight in at number one”.) It was while gobbling down fiction over Christmas and New Year that I realised that acknowledgments sections are the source of some world-class thankbrags.

After powering through Robert Harris’s addictive and gripping thriller, Conclave, about the election of a new pope, I chanced upon the following: “At the outset of my research I asked the Vatican for permission to visit the locations used during a conclave that are permanently closed to the public. I am grateful to Monsignor Guillermo Karcher of the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff for arranging my visit.” Does that mean permission was granted? And that the author saw things denied to “the public”? I guess so. In which case: what’s the point of hiding your light under a bushel and thanking Monsignor Karcher for general unspecified help? If anyone has earned thankbragging rights, it’s Harris.

Sausages and shame

In his annual London Review of Books diary, Alan Bennett has put his finger on a contemporary nightmare: stuffing yourself at the hotel breakfast buffet. If you’ve got bed-and-breakfast inclusive rates, the temptation to go mad is sometimes overwhelming: “Some of the well-to-do guests can’t wait to get the food back from the breakfast bar to their table, one young man downing a tumbler of orange juice en route and a boy stuffing himself with sausages before he even sits down.”

Comedian Michael McIntyre has also commented on middle-class behaviour at the breakfast buffet: how guests feel the urge to sit down at their tables pointlessly for a microsecond, before jumping up and galloping over to the eggs and bacon. At many a film festival I have disgraced myself by trying to curate, secretly, two separate picnic meals for lunch and dinner from the breakfast buffet – casually draping magazines and papers over my table so the disorder supposedly disguises the activity of wrapping bananas and slices of Parma ham in various paper napkins. Oh, the shame of it.