• IN Robert Arlt’s The Seven Madmen (1929) the megalomaniac Astrologer claims the disenchanted masses need a consoling diet of fake news and alternative facts: “The person who can find the lie the masses need will be King of the World.”

He sounds like today’s social media tycoon: “Just like in a pharmacy, we’ll have a wide variety of perfect lies, each one labelled for a different disease of the mind or soul.”

Debt-collector Remo Erdosain concludes: “We have to usher in the realm of falsehood, of magnificent lies,” an era of elite manipulation in which smooth plutocrats, not vulgar tyrants, govern.

The “aristocracy of cynics” will pacify with a bogus paradise. *Boyd Tonkin: The 100 Best Novels.

Just a warning.

MIKE BOR,
W2