Steve Jobs used to wash his feet in the toilet. The late founder of Apple also used to park his car in a disabled spot, screwed friends out of money they were due, didn’t have a licence plate on his Mercedes and liked to tell minions ‘this is shit’. The turtleneck-wearing entrepreneur was very much one of a type, defined by Helen Lewis as the ‘genius asshole’.

And yet, Lewis can’t quite bury Jobs with opprobrium. A self-confessed iPhone and Mac fan, she recognises that he ‘oversaw the creation of some truly excellent consumer technology … and the creation of a studio [Pixar] that made beautiful, tear-jerking animated films’. She recognises too that Apple would not have been Apple were it not for Jobs’s assholery. Steve Wozniak, an early Jobs collaborator, once said that if he had run Apple, it would have been a nicer place to work, but ‘we may never have made the Macintosh’.

Jobs exemplifies what Lewis calls the deficit model of genius: exceptional talent extorts a price. Roughly, we get great stuff – cool tech, wonderful paintings, Shakespeare’s plays, cures for terrible diseases – but we have to put up with sociopathy, controlling behaviour and a lack of personal daintiness. On one