According to my rose tinted glasses, when I was young, the purpose of obituaries in national newspapers was to celebrate the lives of celebrated people, the sort of people who were apt to figure in honours lists.
Whereas now, being worth celebrating is no longer the criterion; being notorious in any walk of life suffices. So today, the Guardian spends more than a page on an Oxbridge academic who sounds as if he was a thoroughly bad person; possibly charming and clever in small doses, if you were lucky enough to have caught him sober. What is the Guardian up to? Is the main purpose of the obituary to remind us that there are some unsavoury people in the senior common rooms of Oxbridge colleges? Something which must surely be true of almost any large institution. And even if it were not, an obituary is not, to my mind, the proper place to be making such a point.
PS: who else can we think of who is charming and clever in small doses, etc...
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