Brief encounters with the dubious

Volume five — or is it six? — in the Simpson autobiography series. For many people, one volume tends to be enough, but Simpson has a lot to tell. In this latest doorstopper, he offers us an engaging collection of ‘snapshots’, essays on a lively and eclectic bunch of characters he’s run into over the years. There’s a crooked extortioner, the maddeningly elusive Japanese emperor and empress, Saddam awaiting execution, film stars, Serbian contract killers, a child sorcerer in the Congo, Chinese tomb-raiders and ‘a variety of other thoroughly dubious people including Robert Mugabe and Alastair Campbell’.

The last few words of that sentence, not buried midway through the book but on its very first page, are a masterstroke. It is an exquisite pleasure to see Campbell so ruthlessly dismissed, separated from one of the world’s nastiest dictators by the slenderest of conjunctions.