Bill Clinton published another memoir last year, entitled Citizen, and I take it that everyone read the book the minute it came out. For those who somehow didn’t, there’s a striking passage that can be easily found by standing in a bookshop, going to the index and searching under ‘E’ for ‘Epstein’.

This leads to a single page reference in which the 42nd president gives a terse and somewhat legalistic account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, explaining that he never went to Epstein’s island, borrowed his plane only to support the work of the Clinton Foundation and cut off contact before Epstein’s first arrest in 2005. In a brusque summary Clinton or his ghostwriters conclude: ‘I wish I had never met him.’

Quite a few eminent people seem to have come to the same conclusion. Epstein appears to have made it his life’s mission to be close to as many prominent people as he could, from politicians and journalists to scientists and lawyers. The ‘little black book’ of his contacts included people he had met, but also the phone numbers of those he hadn’t and apparently wanted to.

There are several ways to see all this. Perhaps Epstein was a high-networking pimp, introducing women to prominent men. Perhaps a number of the men knew he liked underage girls and they liked underage girls too – a fact he could hold over them. Some think that this explains Epstein’s otherwise inexplicable fortune: he was........

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