Not quite a tall tale?

Life is too short? Helen Brown investigates the highs and lows of Small Man Syndrome . . .

SResearch showed that short men are more prone to aggression

MALL. SHORT. Vertically challenged. Diminutive. Wee. The little guy, it would seem, is living down to his reputation as the Mr Angry of the social scene. New scientific findings reckon that, far from being an unfair stereotype, it is not a tall tale to claim that short stature does in fact equal a short fuse.

Conducted by the wonderfully named Professor Abraham Buunk of the University of Groningen in Holland, research showed that short men are more prone to aggression and excessively competitive behaviour, greater outbursts of jealousy over their partners and sheer showing off to make their presence felt.

Men of around 5ft 4 were 50% more likely to exhibit these traits than those over six feet tall. Size obviously matters after all, especially up and down the way.

Evolution and survival of the fittest, of course, has always favoured the big beasts. Makes you wonder how tall Charles Darwin was.

Tall, dark and handsome tends to trump even “solvent” and “GSOH” in lonely heart requirements. Then there’s that current car advert where a willowy lass keeps coming up short on the boyfriend front until she discovers that a hunky six-footer can shoe-horn himself into a Volkswagen Up! And who could forget the stiletto-sharp Nicole Kidman after her split from Tom Cruise, trumpeting that she could wear heels again?

Do the short guys stand a chance? No wonder they’re coming over a trifle tetchy. As opposed to titchy.

Height is still equated with power, strength, wealth and success and low stature with chippiness and an inbuilt inferiority complex.

The wasp-tongued American singer-songwriter Randy Newman penned a satirical number called Short People, ribbing those who denigrate the small but perfectly formed, but even that got on a lot of pocket-sized wicks.

I blame that Napoleon Bonaparte after whom the Napoleon Complex (short man lusting for power) is named.

Only I shouldn’t, it seems. And this is where it the eminent Professor Buunk might find himself de-bunked. The Little Corporal, it would appear, wasn’t that petite – although he was listed as 5ft 2 when he died, that was in French units of the time.

In modern terms, he would cut a finer figure at 5ft 7, quite tall for his day. It’s unfortunate, though, that many of those of a tyrannical temper – Hitler, Mussolini, Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun (who knew?) – were all on the dinky side.

But history is written by the winners – who would tend, by Professor Buunk’s measure, to be tall.

Even contemporary politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy (5ft 5 and the man who single-handedly (or footedly) revived the Cuban heel), allegedly hired in crowds of shorter citizens as a backdrop to crucial photo opportunities. But he still managed to pull the leggy Carla Bruni. For it is a fact, also, that pint-sized guys often have gallons of charisma.

It certainly hasn’t doneAl Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, the aforementioned Tom Cruise, Daniel Radcliffe, Jamie Cullum or Bernie Ecclestone any harm. Or Humphrey Bogart. Or James Cagney, although Alan Ladd was probably most famous for having to stand on a box to kiss his leading ladies than for any of his film roles.

More recently, Cuddly Dudley Moore was nicknamed “the sex thimble”.

Daniel Craig, the most successful James Bond of all time, is only just 5ft 10. And did the sky fall? Nope.

Good things obviously do still come in small parcels although exactly where the lovely Richard Armitage, playing a dwarf in the latest Hobbit outings, fits in I don’t know. He’s 6ft 2 in reality. Go figure.

Having made the assumption that every generation is better fed, fitter and healthier than those who went before, we certainly have a historic picture of mediaeval men as nebby wee guys (apart from Kings Edward IV and HenryVIII who were nebby big guys) with an axe to grind but it turns out that they had little reason to feel small.

A mass grave close to the Battle of Towton, fought during the Wars of the Roses, revealed that 15th century soldiery might have been nasty and brutish but wasn’t necessarily short.

Even the much maligned and allegedly malformed Richard III, according to those who found his bones under that car park, stood a respectable 5ft 8.

Plantagenet and Tudor gents were apparently a fine, upstanding body of men on the whole – some historians suggest it wasn’t until the social ravages of the industrial revolution and the Victorian era that certain sectors of society started to get stunted.

Nowadays, the average height of Scottish men is 5ft 8 while Londoners measure up at between 5ft 9 and 5ft 10. A hundred years ago, those figures were reversed which says more about the draining of financial prosperity from north to south than any diatribe by Alex Salmond.

So don’t sell yourselves short, guys. And enough with the small man jibes. It’s not big and it’s not clever.