The Despicable Ernest Hemingway.

Let us put to one side the man's appalling treatment of women, general debauchery and concentrate on his moral cowardice.

When reporting from Spain during the Spanish Civil War, he would knowingly and happily dine with Soviet Commissars directly responsible for mass executions.

If this were not bad enough, he refused to send information learned to his newspaper bosses who had already paid him phenomenal sums of money to cover this conflict.

It gets even worse. His failure to 'tell the world about the Republican atrocities' was calculated to support the flawed and often evil Republican cause: one which, in years to come, he was forced to admit was every bit as bad - and worse - than anything being done by the misnamed fascists. 

(The Nationalists were not fascists at all but rather, falangists - a fact he really should have known.)

I can neither read his stomach-churning For Whom The Bell Tolls nor bear to watch the film version.

Having watched the six part Hemingway by Ken Burns - horror heaps on horror.

His butchery of great animals for fun was sickening. Was there ever a more self-centred individual on the planet?

BUT you know what? - God still loved even him and we must always endeavour to love the thoroughly unlovable.