Madness and civilization

The casual reader, so we are constantly told by erudite literary pundits such as Charlotte Rampling, Anita Pallenberg and/or Princess Margaret in the bath, is usually won or lost within the first couple of sentences. Here’s a fine example of how to begin a book review (in this instance, of George W Bush’s Decision Points, by Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books):

In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’

The two, needless to say, never met...