IT’S GOING TO BE A GOOD READ. A runaway best-seller already. And perhaps the chief thing that everyone’s talking about is that Steve Jobs was a “flawed character”. But of course! We all are. Absolutely every one of us. From very early on indeed. And it’s sometimes the case that a combination of flaws conspire to turn out a certain kind of genius.

Geniuses, saints, flawed human beings, are not always easy to live with, but we all need them, we need one another, to show us who we are, to give us cause to reflect upon our own flaws, and perhaps to transform them. Some of the people who’ve taught me most have been and are “flawed characters”.

Perhaps it was early recognition of the flaws in me that brought about – in my then eight-year-old self – a precise response to what I believed was the call of Jesus Christ: to love God, and to love my neighbour as myself. Love – the tough, practical work of love – is what enables flawed humanity to celebrate, with God, the marvellous and extraordinary gifts that arise therefrom. What, I wonder, would we call a fellow human being who maintained that he or she was without flaw? … “Flawed”, probably.