A decade ago the tone was set by people like the late Don Simpson, producer of the movie "Top Gun" and a prodigious coke-snorter and whoremonger.
Hazlitt, an avowed republican, was labelled "an infidel, a Jacobin, and a whoremonger" and dismissed as a "Cockney Aristotle," a lower-class writer who wanted to sound like his betters.
"Anonymous" has great fun with this insight, and it is amusing to watch Rafe Spall turn his Shakespeare into a shallow, duplicitous fraud (not to mention a whoremonger, a blackmailer and a murderer).
And he'll know perfectly well that the downside of your biographical subject being "outed" – as a drinker, fighter, whoremonger or whatever – is that it may take away any chance of your book getting the kind of thoughtful critical response that all proper writers crave.
When he wrote publicly, in his violent, sprawling handwriting, of the prime minister as "the Christian whoremonger & hypocrite Gladstone", or of Gladstone's successor, the Earl of Rosebery, as an "underbred disgusting Jew pimp", he made himself repulsive to everyone except his toadies.
The novel still opened in a bar, where 12 men had gathered, and she based each of these characters on a star sign – so with Dick Mannering, for instance, who represents Leo, "I thought, OK, well, Leo's the fifth house of the zodiac, it's associated with games and competitions, and it's called the house of pleasure, so I'll make him a whoremonger".
But he would eulogise whores, whoremongers, even lawyers, to where their own mothers wanted to recognise them.
In fact, his crime was probably not mala vita — in which many Venetians of the time were enthusiastically engaged, with no interference from the authorities — but, once again, the writing of seditious verse, this time a poem describing various dignitaries as whoremongers and the like.
Eliot had reached a pitch of emotional pain where he saw nothing between whoremongering or murder and sainthood – his father's sense of sex as diabolism had won in the end.
Director Michael Bay, meanwhile, has honed the Simpsonian virtues into a recognisable cinematic style that, relying as it does on bottomless stupidity and a heavy throbbing in the cranium, quite brilliantly captures the way Don must have felt the morning after his whoremongering booze'n'drug binges.
He could produce ample evidence that Catholics were bare-faced liars, cheats, thieves, adulterers, pornographers, whoremongers and gangsters, to whom the church sold forgiveness in return for hard cash.
