Writing obituaries is not a gloomy job, says Nigel Farndale in The Times. We recently described Sir Jeremiah Harman as a “rude, lazy, short-tempered, unpredictable” judge, a member of his family got in touch to tell us we’d got him “spot on”.
Euphemisms are used a lot; “an uncompromisingly direct way with the opposite sex” (flasher); “not known to toy with his food” (glutton); “remarkably liberated from the tyranny of ambition” (lazy); “comfortable with confrontation” (complete psycho).
