Who has the last word on the dearly departed?
“Said a bridge player splattered with gore looking down at the corpse on the floor: ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum– but still, he’s been caught out revoking before.’”
De mortuis? Nothing but the best? That is what distinguishes an obituary, which tries to look on the bright side of the dear departed, from the relentless honesty of the Dictionary of National Biography– a distinction which was made very clear at a DNB event a dozen days ago in London.
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