Now even his remaining fans among western investors have lost patience with his headstrong style and murky plans to sell off bits of his company.

ECONOMIST: Putin versus the oligarchs?

The English, with rare exceptions, were unsympathetic to his loud, polemical style, his declamatory poetry based more on sound than sense, his pictures assembled from bits of detritus, his artistic pranks and his love of outrageous nonsense which he used to deflate and then liberate his audiences.

ECONOMIST: Kurt Schwitters