Death confers dignity and importance on well-known people, at least for a time.

A year or two later their reputations begin to dip, and stay that way for decades. Then time repeats what death did, if there is a reason for it: it reconfers dignity and importance. Some of the deceased are rediscovered, and a more realistic assessment of their legacies can be given.

The reason for the dip is twofold. First, those who were sceptical about a deceased celebrity’s merits keep quiet during the first months. His family mourns, so do his fans, almost everyone feels that death, in general, deserves a respectful reticence, in which mention of the good and silence about the bad aspects of the departed’s life and character is appropriate. It is regarded as bad taste to launch too early the kind of attack that the deceased often enough suffered in his or her lifetime.

But when a sufficient interval has passed the sceptics can begin to take aim. “Facts” start “coming out”, which change the deceased’s image. Family and acquaintances speak more freely. The hallowing effect of recent death wears off, and a more complicated and less glowing picture emerges.

Secondly, the recent past always seems tawdry and passé in comparison to the more distant past, and this applies to the people who were celebrities in it. Look at images of people and fashions in the 1980s, and compare them to images from the 1950s; the latter seem far more interesting because more remote and magical. The 1980s just seem old hat. While the past moves through its old- hat to its magical stage, the personalities in it have to suffer the same fate.

These are the reasons why it is difficult to assess a famous person’s legacy until sufficient time has passed. Most fame is of its moment; most of the stars, the politicians, the cynosures of fashion and public interest whom the paparazzi once pursued, sink into oblivion under history’s weight. Those whose memory survives either were truly outstanding in their generation, or did something that had real effects on what came after them.

This has always been so. In the world of classical Greece and Rome, and in ancient China, immortality was a matter of reputation. The greater your contribution, the more people you would be remembered by, and for longer. To have a noble posthumous reputation marked by a statue or immortalisation in an ode was the highest ambition of the ambitious.

Matters are no different now. There are not many people one can confidently say will be remembered and applauded in twenty years’ time, other than by a coterie of devotees. We forget this fact when a celebrity dies; and then we forget the celebrity

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