‘Warts and all.’ It means an unsanitised picture or narrative of someone, free of enhancements, complete with flaws. It means being shown the unadulterated truth, the bad along with the good. Some ascribe the saying to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector (or military dictator) in the 1650s, when England was briefly a republic. Though it was to be a quasi-royal portrait, he told the painter to make a true likeness, unflattering, revealing all his “roughness, pimples [and] warts”.