Don’t badmouth the dead, said Chilon of Sparta. Over time, the phrase became a positive injunction to say nothing of the dead unless it was good, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Christopher Hitchens had a different rule: say anything you like, so long as it was something you’d have been willing to say while they were alive.

For him, death did not work as absolution, and the lives of figures public enough to merit scrutiny while they lived merited the same scrutiny in the aftermath of their death – perhaps even more acutely, because death was a time to reflect on who they were.

When someone dies, and especially if they die by their own hand after public humiliation, as seems likely to have happened with Jason Arday, a great deal changes. Only a short time ago, Arday’s fabulism was comic. His death makes it tragic.

Tragedy and comedy are often closer together than we like to feel. In Shakespeare In Love, Tom Stoppard began with the Bard writing Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. He was quite right that the opening of Romeo and Juliet could easily have set the scene for a comedy. Romeo’s youthful ability to fall eternally in love with Juliet, having moments before done exactly the same with Rosaline, was the recipe.

We are not required to give up memory, or judgement, or........

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