The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publica… - Paul Johnson

Karl Heinzen, who retaliated with a memorable portrait of the angry little man. He found Marx ‘intolerably dirty’, a ‘cross between a cat and an ape’; with ‘dishevelled coal-black hair and dirty yellow complexion’. It was, he said, impossible to say whether his clothes and skin were naturally mud-coloured or just filthy. He had small, fierce, malicious eyes, ‘spitting out spurts of wicked fire’; he had a habit of saying: ‘I will annihilate you.

With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors.

The fourth concept Rousseau popularized was in some ways the most pervasive of all. When society evolves from its primitive state of nature to urban sophistication, he argued, man is corrupted: his natural selfishness, which he calls amour de soi, is transformed into a far more pernicious instinct, amour-propre, which combines vanity and self-esteem, each man rating himself by what others think of him and thus seeking to impress them by his money, strength, brains and moral superiority. His natural selfishness becomes competitive and acquisitive, and so he becomes alienated not only from other men, whom he sees as competitors and not brothers, but from himself.5 Alienation induces a psychological sickness in man, characterized by a tragic divergence between appearance and reality.