Before the high-stakes courtroom flame-outs of sexual harasser Craig McLachlan and war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, one of the most famous cases in this country’s defamation canon featured a Sydney lobster restaurant successfully suing The Sydney Morning Herald and its legendary food critic Leo Schofield for a bad review.

In 1984, Schofield ate at the Blue Angel in Darlinghurst, later penning a fun screed against the establishment. It included killer lines, such as that the grilled lobster had been “cooked until every drop of juice and joy had been successfully eliminated, leaving a charred husk of shell containing meat that might have been an albino walrus”. Schofield and the old Fairfax lost to Blue Angel, and was ordered to pay $100,000 in damages. Tough to rely on a truth defence when you digest the evidence.