Of all the furtive pleasures available to the modern human being, surely the spectacle of another person being mown down in viciously perfect prose is the most shameful.
I hate that I love it, but I do. Horrible restaurant reviews, lordly shreddings for films about which I was personally ambivalent, grammatically-perfect letters of violent complaint to airline companies; I adore them all.
Even worse (and this really is a terrible secret) I enjoy them all the more when they are frankly indefensible on the grounds of unbelievable rudeness, or having clearly been written by a person with an uncontrollable superiority complex.
For instance, I've never read anything quite so ISIL-grade unprovoked as the UK Telegraph's art critic Stephen Bayley's savage "review" of a painting belonging to British Labour MP David Miliband. "Bad art is at least as fascinating as good art, the more so when it hangs on the wall of a leader of political opinion," wrote Bayley in his 800-word laceration of the painting, which was incautious enough to be hanging behind Miliband when he posed for a photo with his wife shortly after losing the Labor leadership ballot to his brother Ed in 2010.
"Were it not for an episode of colour-saturated 3D Biblical stab-you-in-the-front fratricide, the owner of this badly drawn, cruel daub would be a potential prime minister."
I reread this knuckle-bitingly unkind piece during a recent frenzy of schadenfreude triggered by New York Times critic Pete Wells' much-circulated excoriation of the Big Apple's famous restaurant Per Se.
The loftier the target, the more horribly compelling the takedown, and Wells picks off dish after dish with the cold ferocity of a Storm Trooper.
"The kitchen could improve the bacon-wrapped cylinder of quail simply by not placing it on top of a dismal green pulp of cooked romaine lettuce, crunchy and mushy at once," he writes. "Draining off the gluey, oily liquid would have helped a mushroom potpie from turning into a swampy mess. I don't know what could have saved limp, dispiriting yam dumplings, but it definitely wasn't a lukewarm matsutake mushroom bouillon as murky and appealing as bong water."
The review – whose sting could only partly have been alleviated for chef Thomas Keller by the US$325-a-head cover charge at Per Se – sent me immediately on a guilty trawl of previous favourites.
AA Gill's famous 2011 decimation of the Parisian institution, L'Ami Louis, for example:
"After 30 minutes what come are a pair of intimidatingly gross flabs of chilly pate, with a slight coating of pustular yellow fat. They are dense and stringy, with a web of veins. I doubt they were made on the premises. The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber's putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction."
And that wasn't even the worst dish.
"Nothing I have eaten or heard of being eaten here prepared me for the arrival of the veal kidneys en brochette. Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don't taste as nice as they sound."
Reviews like this become a performance in themselves, their authors accumulating fame and exposure in compensation for never again being able to eat out with 100 per cent confidence of avoiding cranio-facial injury. For readers, they offer the voyeuristic thrill of reading words so cruel you'd never think of uttering them yourself.
The British writer Giles Coren, who has mauled many a restaurant, occasionally shifts his sights to his own colleagues.
"Never ever ask me to write something for you. And don't pay me," Coren fumed in 2002 in an enthrallingly vicious (and instantly-circulated) rant to a sub-editor who had changed a single word in his copy.
"I'd rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal - my integrity would be less compromised.
Jesus f..king wept I don't know what else to say."
There is a terrible line attributed to Clive James, purportedly uttered when he came across a subeditor adjusting his column for The Observer. "If I wrote like that, I'd be you," he is supposed to have snapped.
Some years ago, I met James and asked him (horrified) to confirm the story.
"Oh, no," he said. "I'd never be that funny or vicious. I told Christopher Hitchens what I'd felt like saying, then Hitch somehow told the story as if I had said it."
This is the central appeal of the written takedown. It offers all the satisfaction of a perfectly-worded, crisply-delivered assault (and which of us has not retrospectively constructed one of these, as we drive away fuming from an argument over a car park, or relive impotently the afternoon's clash with passive-aggressive Linda from Accounts?) But it allows one to keep one's own hands clean. It's a triumph for cowards.
Twitter @annabelcrabb
