For Boris, that photo is a youthful jeu d’esprit which can easily be laughed aside.

No one, however, has noticed the jeu d'esprit of anagrams and awful puns.

In a 2003 review for Mojo magazine, however, he described it more favourably as "an efficient jeu d'esprit".

His book is, in a way, an extended jeu d'esprit : clever, funny and sometimes a little wearisome.

It was a misfired jeu d'esprit.

Customizable in a cavalcade of colors and flavors, and infused with that quintessential French jeu d’esprit, the macaron is poised as the newest “it” pastry.

In this paper he wrote an Elegy on the Marquis of Anglesey's Leg, a jeu d'esprit which has been persistently attributed to Canning.

An extended jeu d'esprit, being a series of promises made by an overworked and underappreciated office junior to the assistant she will have when she finally gets to be a boss.

Journalist and novelist Robert Harris compared her book to Hitler's Mein Kampf, an analogy that he now calls a "jeu d'esprit," but doesn't back away from entirely.

Such jeu d’esprit often falls between the cracks in earnest punk histories, but, as Pete Shelley notes: “You can’t have punk without humour – that would be missing the point.

Adam Shatz, writing for the London Review of Books, states that it "is the work of a nihilist not a hater - the jeu d'esprit of a man without convictions".

He won a great deal of affection last year for Midnight in Paris, an elegant jeu d'esprit that leaned heavily on past glories but got through on the charm of its conceit and performances.

One version included an introductory note explaining its author's intentions: "This jeu d'esprit was extemporized, I may fairly say, so rapidly was it written, purely for my own amusement and with no thought of publication" until convinced to do so by Briggs.

Junk food tradition is embraced, in the form of fish and chips, a burger, a banana split, and even 'hot dog, popcorn and ice-cream soda' which I initially took to be some clever gastronomic jeu d'esprit, but which is actually just what it says it is.

Some of us may even take a slightly perverse delight in the ability to rattle off the first 90-odd names of the elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's Modern Major General, thanks to the jeu d'esprit of a brash young Harvard junior-faculty statistician in the early 1950s.

Edward Birch was moved to compose some (fairly poor) verses in response when he reported "seeing the following jeu d'esprit in a Handbill posted up in Plaistow, as a 'CAUTION' to prevent persons from supporting the intended inclosure of Hainault or Waltham Forest."

Isis weaponry AFP In the certain knowledge that it will irk those for whom life is one long dreary struggle against unacceptable attitudes, I repeat a favourite jeu d'esprit of mine.