In or out of mating season, John Bolton in full swollen umbrage is never an edifying spectacle, which makes it all the more puzzling that producers insist on providing this diplomatic reject and rage-aholic with a peddler's license to lie, bluster, and fearmonger.

We Americans are now accustomed to the likes of Bolton in full coconut-heaving mode but the Brits have been less exposed to neoconservatism in the malignant raw, and Matthew Carr's review of Bolton's recent perf on the Today show read like a report filed from behind a one-way mirror at a psychiatric clinic.