Pointing to the statue on top of the adjacent St Pancras terminus, which was built as a direct competitor in the 1860s, Johnson said that the "acroterion had scorned, and sneered at" King's Cross.
In between, this frustrated fortysomething - disliked by his wife, scorned by his daughter, humiliated by his colleagues - undergoes a startling metamorphosis.
Now aged 86, he has been one of the Labour party's greatest loyalists so his article in the Telegraph, a paper he has long scorned, was significant.
The novelist Hari Kunzru scorned Macmillan as 'the Ryanair of publishing', a libel on the feisty low-cost carrier.
Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, scorned the offer as incomprehensible and vowed to use "all necessary means" to fight it.
Not the Marxist sort, though he fell out often with the party over clause four of its constitution, which committed the party to nationalising the means of production, distribution and exchange; though he scorned the free market New Labour so hotly embraced, and found global capitalism disgusting.
HELL hath no fury like an ambitious politician scorned.
The shadow of Iraq, the conflict that Mr Obama scorned as George W. Bush's "dumb war", lies across his decision-making, especially when weighing intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
In 1952 Sauvy wrote that "this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World, like the Third Estate, wants to become something, too".
Scorned by their peers as flunkeys, they felt constrained by their position from doing much more than sing rudely over the washing-up.
But players who have tried to "justify" their use of PEDs by saying they were simply trying to recover from an injury have been consistently scorned.
