‘Anyone who’s not a misanthrope by the time he’s forty has never felt the slightest affection for the human race.’ It was apparently at this time of life that Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1740–94) began jotting down his thoughts, reflections and anecdotes. As the above sample indicates, Chamfort’s life of excess and disappointment had equipped him with a heightened sensitivity to paradox, folly and absurdity. His massive, albeit fragmentary, literary output was only discovered after his death, and until now has not been available in any substance to readers outside the French-speaking world.

The rediscovery of a past master of the aphorism may not seem propitious, for ours is not an age that values such candour and depth of insight. As George Orwell foresaw, and as contemporary commentators such as Don Watson and Christopher Hitchens labour to point out, such pith as there is in public speech nowadays rarely amounts to more than a sound bite, catchphrase or whatever the current fashion in bureaucratic and management jargon happens to be.