Gooch's biography felt at times censorious, stopping inches short of blaming O'Hara's death on his alcoholism, as though heavy drinking led inevitably to getting hit by a dune buggy.
And they still act as warnings that today's censorious critics of everything from Oliver Stone films to dung art may have reason to feel sheepish tomorrow.
Whatever else we think of Huhne and his catalogue of deceit, and however badly he has behaved towards his family, we can still feel empathy for a man who had such personal opprobrium heaped on him through this impersonal channel, and then had it placed before the voyeuristic gaze of a censorious public.
Other conservatives who, like Fest, had long felt the sharp end of Grass's censorious pen were quick to broaden the critique; in Le Figaro, Guy Sorman attacked Grass not just for covering up his own past but for being an apologist for "bad causes," such as Cuba and Communist China.
But sometimes, especially when it comes to manners and morals, we find the censorious tones of the declinist.
It was at the behest of its producers (one of them Tom Cruise), who naturally felt concern for the sensitivities of the victims' families as well as a reluctance to attract censorious attention to a thriller that opens with an assassin coolly picking off apparently random targets in a provincial city.
Tellingly, when Benjamin addressed the subject of astrology, he was more sympathetic than censorious, seeing it as evidence of a largely extinct identification with nature: "Modern man can be touched by a pale shadow of this on southern moonlit nights in which he feels, alive within himself, mimetic forces that he had thought long since dead".
No point being censorious.
Lewis was not entirely censorious.
There is no censorious undertone.
