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January 24, 2017updated 25 Jan 2017 9:55am

Newspaper and magazine columnists: Journalism’s preposterous prima donnas

By David Randall

Of all the bizarre and disturbing creatures that inhabit newspapers and magazines, none are quite so preposterous as columnists.

Reporters are often obsessive, copy editors pernickity to the point where you want to head butt them, and editors, however scholarly, tend to have much in common, psychologically, with the leaders of military juntas. But columnists, quite definitely, are the strangest of the lot.

To be fair (as commentators invariably write in the final paragraph when they have spent all the previous ones being outrageously unfair), columnists are not one species, but a vast family of them, plus assorted sub-species and mutants.

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