Robert Conquest (1917-2015) wrote a limerick of genius

Robert Conquest, who did much to make the West grasp the scale of Stalin's terror, has died at the age of 98.

I am pleased that his Telegraph obituary finds room for his brilliant rendering of Shakespeare's seven ages of man as a limerick.

Here it is without the coy asterisks:

First you get puking and mewling,
Then very pissed off with your schooling,
Then fucks and then fights,
Then judging chaps' rights,
Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.