Dimbleby in his dotage is a devilish delight. RFK Jr’s bare chest, not so much

It’s publication week for American Canto, the hastily turned-around memoir by the former New York magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi, who took on the challenge of explaining what it is about Robert F Kennedy Jr she found so alluring.

- Emma Brockes

Nuzzi, if you’ve fallen behind, developed romantic feelings for the then presidential candidate, who is now Donald Trump’s health secretary, while profiling him for the magazine - and since I’ve had to read this sentence, you do too: “He was exhausted, and he threw himself on to the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest.” If you have a favourite part of RFK Jr’s chest, or consider chests in general subject to preference by localised area, this may be the book for you.

As mockery in the press rose to a shriek, so Nuzzi’s defenders started to rally. Monica Lewinsky, who, with Amanda Knox, has become the most ubiquitous figure of our age, reached out to Nuzzi to offer sympathy. The author Lisa Taddeo praised Nuzzi for writing what she called on Instagram a “scintillating love story” and posted a sentence seemingly caught in the undertow effect of reading Nuzzi at length. From Taddeo: “All across the internet little boys and girls are wielding poison darts they didn’t even check the constitution of before lobbing in the direction of somebody who has achieved enough intrigue and intelligence in their life and ...”

Nuzzi, who was a good writer at New York magazine, appears to have fallen prey to the combination of a tight deadline, the destabilising effect that the words “book deal” can have on even the most sensible writer and the need to dignify an otherwise embarrassing story with paragraph-long sentences feverishly hoping for flight.