One of the many uncomplicated joys of Mad Men is that the series takes us back to a faster, brighter world where you were allowed to smoke in the office and enjoy a martini, or three, at the end of the day before conducting a wild affair with your boss/secretary.

At the sharp end of advertising in the 1950s, characters such as Don Draper almost certainly existed in all their unreconstructed splendour. One copywriting king, whose influence stretched across the English-speaking world, deep into the 1960s and 70s, was the founder of Ogilvy Benson & Mather, the hard-driving Scot David Ogilvy, who died in 1999. His obiter dicta, collected in The Unpublished David Ogilvy, newly reissued by Profile, could easily slot into almost any Mad Men script, no questions asked,

Ogilvy is direct, chauvinist and aggressive. "Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches," he declares, and elsewhere: "America is alive and well and living in New Hampshire."

Behind the unsentimental Scottish drive lurks a belief in the customer, an affection for family values ("whenever you write a commercial, bear in mind that it is likely to be seen by your children, your wife and your conscience") and a deep attachment to the value of plain English. An advertiser of the Orwell generation, he was "revolted by pseudo-academic jargon, such as attitudinal, paradigms, demassification, reconceptualise, suboptimal, symbiotic, linkage, splinterisation and dimensionalism".

This slender volume (192 pages) is full of good sense. Ogilvy made a conscious effort "to avoid recruiting dull, pedestrian hacks". His agency was "the teaching hospital of the advertising world". This, of course, was based in America, the Ur-home of advertising.