Jolyon Maugham’s opening sentence might be the worst of all time

In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: ‘The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not,’ Maugham writes in Bringing Down Goliath. It certainly acts as a tantaliser. If this is only the first sentence, what other jewels are contained in the remaining 318 pages?

After we’ve picked ourselves up from the floor, it’s worth unpacking – or trying to unpack – this remarkable string of words. ‘But’ and ‘and’ seem to be in each other’s places. Swapping them around would lift some, though not all, of the line’s tortuous quality. Even so, the opening gambit still clunks like a sack of coal being emptied down a chute: the thing Maugham is trying to convey just doesn’t make sense.