Today's grubby wars leave no great figures behind.
All this makes Star Island feel like the shallow light entertainment it seeks to satirise, littered with celebs and their grubby secrets, and Abbott's brash words about the symbiotic relationship between celebs and their watchers never really get probed.
The frail, 92-year-old Mandela may remain the most beloved and respected man on the planet, but during its years in power, the organization he championed, the African National Congress, has become, in the words of the historian Martin Meredith, "just another grubby political party on the make".
In other words, it needs to engage in the grubby, time-consuming work of politics, both of the protest and electoral kind.
I am not keen on any product name containing the word "miracle", so I feel a bit grubby about the fact that Olay's (already a bit iffy-sounding) Wrinkle Relaxing Complex has been reborn as 10 Minute Miracle (£29.99).
And the furniture that arrived osmotically — in other words, free, flowing from one family member to another — is grubby and brown.
In 1872, when it was a grubby village in a desolate prairie, one visitor claimed that the first words Dallasites taught their babies were "Hurrah, hurrah for Dallas!" The New Yorker's John Bainbridge noted: "No matter how grand its trappings, Dallas will remain at heart a drummer".
When she first painted a vagina framed inside the word POLITICS, Bri Cirel had no idea that Donald Trump's grubby fingers would soon become a national conversation.
Then, on a typically downbeat damp morning in Manchester, came a 32-word tweet from a club that once considered itself above the grubby manoeuvrings of lesser football institutions.
Barber complied and found himself treated as a minor celebrity, though his standing was damaged by the publication of a volume with the title More Last Words of Dr Johnson by "Francis, Barber" – the comma a clue, widely overlooked, that this grubby hotchpotch had been put together by another Francis, who professed to have had the honour of dressing Johnson's wig.
