If Oliver Kamm did not exist, and if there was a weekly Private Eye column under that name, publishing the material that currently appears at his blog, few would question its excellence. The best approach to Kamm, the one yeilding the maximum quota of enjoyment from his prose, is indeed to forget the inconvenient fact of his existence and relish the excellent satirical fiction. I offer as evidence the following sentence -
I have received a lot of correspondence about my recent and continuing series on Noam Chomsky, most of it along the lines of – to quote one message in full and as it is written – “BANKER ASSHOLE UNLIKE YOU CHOMSKY DEFENDS THE POOR”. I don’t believe this is true, but in any event it doesn’t deal with the subject of my posts, which concerns Chomsky’s handling of source material.
Simply place Kamm's existence 'under erasure', as it were, to release the full rhetorical potential of these words, and to relish the Dickensian sharpness with which the character is delineated in all its ponderous self-importance. Priceless.