Love or loathe or barely tolerate their politics, The Economist is a master of two arts: the image-caption and the obituary. The former has been drawn to attention recently via the related interaction of word and image that is the satirical cartoon. The latter is a form of writing that is always difficult, and always (in my experience) well done by them: invariably human, to the point of humanising the inhumane (for example, for Pol Pot and Ieng Sary); often looking light and easy, sometimes wry, and deploying the full repertory of the sardonic; elevating to high art a form that, in any other hands, risks falling into pathos, bathos, cliché, and platitude.

Here is the full text of their beautiful epitaph for Charb: