Musicians cruelly say that Vivaldi wrote not 600 concertos but the same concerto 600 times. Many columnists are the same. Confronted by a blank screen, a blank mind and a fixed deadline the other side of a boozy lunch, they revert to themes, jokes and rhetorical tricks used so many times that they type themselves.
If Alan Coren had days like that, no trace appears in this collection of 80-odd columns spanning 47 years. Not one piece resembles another, except in the richly allusive phrase-making and the glorious incongruity of the scenarios. The Sage of Cricklewood was a master wordsmith, possibly the best to have written for The Times during my 25 years here, and I’d have liked to have known more from his journalist