When people say that "we live in unprecedented times", I always wonder if it's true. After all, human history is full of weird tales. Providing Donald Trump doesn't try to promote his horse into the Senate, or execute those who fall asleep during his speeches, there'll always be Roman emperors who'll make him look rather dull.
It's not only Trump. We live in unprecedented times, people suggest, because of the inflammatory way we speak to each other. Social media has coarsened the debate. Even world leaders – we're back to President Trump – use Twitter, it is said, to talk about their opponents in the most demeaning of ways.
Witness, they say, Trump's recent tweet about this "so-called judge".
A new low, people say. Such language: unheard of.
I'm no fan of Trump, nor of the way people speak to each other on social media. But I do wonder if it's particularly new.
Two books have ended up on my bedside table this week: one brand new, delivered from the UK; another torn and furry, picked up at a second-hand bookstore. Having spent the week with both, I've decided the public discourse of the past makes Twitter – and even Trump – look restrained.
"So-called Judge"? Is that all you've got?
First, the old book: it's Knockers, published in 1972 by the Australian journalist Keith Dunstan. It's a survey of the insults which Australians have hurled at each other over the years.
Dunstan quotes the Sydney journalist John Norton, whose newspaper The Truth largely consisted of pages of Norton's alliterative insults, attacking pretty much everybody.
Here's Norton, for instance, on the subject of Queen Victoria: "the podgy-figured, sulky-faced, little German woman ... this flabby, fat and flatulent-looking scion." Norton nodded to custom by finishing his piece "God Save the Queen" but only, he added, "to keep her rascal of a turf-swindling, card-sharping, wife-debauching, boozing, rowdy of a son, Albert Edward Prince of Wales, off the throne."
The attack on the Prince of Wales was not unique to The Truth. The Bulletin refused to use the term "His Royal Highness" when covering the man's Australian tour, instead always referring to him either as "The Tummy" or "The Fat Little Baccarat Man."
In another chapter, Dunstan lists the miseries faced by Australian writers – flogged by the critics and ignored by the public. He cites the high proportion of Australian writers who succumbed to suicide, concluding that it was usually the only possible response to the unrestrained criticism they received.
Even when the writers died young, their critics were hardly apologetic. Here again is John Norton: "If Australia has not proved propitious to poets, it has to be recollected what a drivelling, drunken lot the majority of them have been."
Norton was particularly offended by the outpouring of grief, expressed by fellow writers, upon the death of the poet Victor Daley: "The booming of a drunk derelict like Daley by a band of boozing bar-bumming bards is disgusting in the extreme. If tolerated without protest it would encourage the growth of a pest from which this land already suffers, the pothouse poet."
Of course, Dunstan was writing before the era of Paul Keating and so was unable to include the rich invective which accompanied the former prime minister's every outward breath.
The second book which nestles on my bedside table is, however, able to take up the slack. Scorn is a new compendium of "The Wittiest and Wickedest Insults in Human History", as collected by the British political writer Matthew Parris.
Keating, I notice with pleasure, is represented by 11 of his better sallies: among them, "being flogged by a warm lettuce" (Keating on Howard); "a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze" (Keating on Howard); and "It's the first time the Honourable Gentleman has got out from under the sunlamp" (Keating on Peacock). This is equal to Churchill, who also has 11 listings, although Churchill's chip at Clement Attlee may be the wittiest: "a sheep in sheep's clothing".
Parris has some recent inclusions from the world of social media. He quotes Bette Midler, commenting after Kim Kardashian tweeted a naked selfie: "If Kim wants us to see a part of her we've never seen, she's gonna have to swallow the camera."
And he quotes Noel Gallagher's legendary skewering of his brother Liam: "A man with a fork in a world of soup".
What's interesting, though, is that the really rough stuff is almost always pre-Twitter. Here, for instance, is Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan: "a triumph of the embalmer's art". Or this – from Senator William Jenner knocking the New York governor Averell Harriman: "He's thin, boys. He's thin as piss on a hot rock".
Or Dorothy Parker, upon hearing that President Calvin Coolidge had died: "How can they tell?"
Doing a last-minute check of Keating's inclusion, I've just found another, lurking in a different section of Parris' book. It's Keating when asked the best way to see Darwin: "From 20,000 feet in the air, on the way to Paris."
This brings Keating to 12 – one better than Churchill. Ah, surge of national pride. Give the man a Twitter account: Trump and the rest of the Twitterati will be shown for the soft-hearted pussycats they really are.