Colin Sheridan: The impossible dilemma of Man City's polarising perfection

City and Guardiola have done it well, too well, so well that their dominance and the conditions that led to it may end up breaking football as we know it

BLUE WAVE: Manchester City fans celebrate as the team bus arrives ahead of the Premier League match at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester. Pic: PA

In the book Monsters; A Fans Dilemma, film critic Claire Dederer tackles the perennially challenging subject of whether or not it’s ok to love the art of a morally repugnant artist. To critique the question, Dederer looks at creative icons personal to her — Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Pablo Picasso amongst them. These are not just talented, difficult men, prone to fits of petulant anger, these are “geniuses” accused of some pretty unforgivable things. Polanski fled America after being convicted of the statutory rape of a child, Allen married his adopted daughter, and Picasso allegedly abused his many, many lovers. They are, as the title of the book suggests, complex monsters who created incredibly affecting and influential art.

Dederer concludes, ultimately, that whether or not one can separate the dancer from the dance is an unanswerable question, and that these men can be judged as both geniuses and “monsters”. “I found I couldn't resolve the problem of Roman Polanski by thinking’, she writes. “The poet William Empson said life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis. I found myself in the midst of one of those contradictions.”