How to sort in descending order on a field mapped to multiple database columns

Last August (2013) I ran into an issue where I wanted to get the latest 10 created entities from a database table but I was getting the first 10 instead. The relevant components of the stack involved were PostgreSQL 9.3, with Hibernate 4.2 used as the EntityManager provider for Spring Data JPA 1.4. Turns out that the cause is an old, obscure (but known) issue in Hibernate: HHH-5574.