The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2014)

I happen lately to have been reading about a personage who strikes me more as a specimen of the worst possible taste than as a real person, namely the late Simon John Beverley, alias Sid Vicious. It is dangerous, though, to allow oneself ever to think of anybody as a mere specimen, however horrible whatever he might supposedly be a specimen of, for that way inhumanity lies. Even the most depraved person is precisely that, a person, and one must never permit oneself completely to forget it.

And nothing I can do.

This is banal, no doubt, the level of poetry one might expect to find in a greetings card of some description, but it is not crude in the way that the life of Mr Vicious had always hitherto been crude.

seemed to be going through a lot less pain.

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Threats of Pain and Ruin, will be published this summer.

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