Ideas received or rejected

Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really need to have been somewhere weird like Harrow to understand. Initially, I felt the same way about I’m Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me. Like Root, it’s sure to be found in every middle-class downstairs loo everywhere by the time Christmas is over, but on my first flick-through it seemed to me to fail in its most important duty: casual browsability.

It purports to be a dictionary of received ideas and sometimes you stumble upon a definition of truly staggering aptitude — e.g. ‘Beckham, David. Attention-seeking football player admired by children for the accuracy of his corner kicks’; ‘Georgian Town Houses.