Commentary Five years ago in January, a pop singer called David Bowie died. From the scale of the press coverage of his demise, you might have thought that someone of world-historical importance had passed away; and of course, most of the coverage was laudatory. The principle that one should not speak ill of the dead, at least immediately after their death, and except in cases such as Hitler and Stalin, is a good and civilized one, but it does not entail a preposterous inflation either of the virtues or the importance of the departed. To mark the fifth anniversary of this earth-shattering event, the left-liberal newspaper, the Guardian, published a hagiographic  article about him titled “‘His life is a rebuke to cynicism’: what five years without David Bowie has taught us.” It starts with a passage that makes the death of Little Nell in “The Old Curiosity Shop” seem hard-edged …