Must we always be treated as infants by a monstrous regiment of scolds?

What an awful title. Something we hacks are forever saying (along with ‘Make mine a double’ and ‘Is it still plagiarism if I change the names and set it in Singapore rather than Sheffield?’) is: ‘WE DON’T WRITE THE HEADLINES.’ How much worse, then, when it’s a book, and such an excellent one to boot: a right robust romp of a read — short but perfectly formed essays on how everything from bats to Best Picture has been weaponised by the monstrous regiment of modern scolds.

Of course, nagging is nothing new. Quentin Letts believes it came to this country with the Norman Conquest, remarking on ‘the centralised bureaucracy of the Domesday Book… an explosion of red tape from which England has never quite recovered’. And, indeed, France today, for all its yapping about liberty, has any number of petty laws: 40 per cent of music played on radio stations must be French; parents may prevent adult children from getting married; and, adorably, it’s illegal to carry live snails on the TGV unless they have a ticket. Less amusingly, the fusspot tendency of the French ruling class has led them to an almost parasexual enthusiasm for that El Dorado of bureaucratic bustling the EU, the alpha and omega of modern bossiness.

Back in the mists of time, those who told us what to do were what we’d call right-wing today — but of course they didn’t think of themselves as that. There were rich men and there were serfs, and that was the natural order. But as the divine right of kings and feudalism disappeared, freeing the mass of humanity from automatic deference, a new class arose to take over dressing-down duties. The tsars invented the gulags, but their ownership passed seamlessly to the Bolsheviks. This time, though, it was For Our Own Good.