Sunday round-up 16 February 2025

Christopher Eccleston, Valentino Rossi and Senator Jon Ossoff all mark birthdays today, as terrorist group Hezbollah turns 40 and the Kyoto Protocol is 20

Today’s candidates for the bumps (gently now) include former Labour cabinet minister and anti-apartheid activist Lord Hain (75), actor, director, producer and Star Trek: The Next Generation stalwart LeVar Burton (68), rapper, actor and not-his-real-name Ice-T (67), tennis legend and broadcaster John McEnroe (66), Def Leppard founder and guitarist Pete Willis (65), singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and Duran Duran survivor Andy Taylor (64), versatile stage and screen actor Christopher Eccleston (61), Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali (51), Sesame Street puppeteer John Tartaglia (47), motorcycle racing icon Valentino Rossi (46), model, actress and singer Agyness Deyn (42), documentary filmmaker and United States Senator for Georgia Jon Ossoff (38), actress and not-her-sisters Elizabeth Olsen (36) and singer-songwriter, actor and oh-behave-yourself The Weeknd (35).

Beyond the reach of streamers and cards is a mixed-ability group of characters like pioneering Protestant theologian and Martin Luther whisperer Philip Melanchthon (1497), Admiral of France, leading Huguenot and destined-to-meet-a-sticky-end Gaspard de Coligny, Seigneur de Châtillon (1519), Friedrich Wilhelm, the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg (1620), biologist, statistician and whoops-how-awkward eugenicist Sir Francis Galton (1822), titan of English history G.M. Trevelyan (1876), admired-by-the-Nazis race scientist and polemicist Hans F.K. Günther (1891), former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and author of “the Long Telegram” George Kennan (1904), Leave It To Beaver star Hugh Beaumont (1909), fast food franchise pioneer Richard McDonald (1909), Holocaust victim and Anna’s-elder-sister Margot Frank (1926), influential director John Schlesinger (1926), EastEnders’ eternal Dot Cotton June Brown (1927), actress, dancer and animal rights activist Gretchen Wyler (1932), actor and director Brian Bedford (1935), actor, singer and congressman Sonny Bono (1935), former Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong Il (1941), author and playwright Iain (M.) Banks (1954), model and actress Margaux Hemingway (1954) and musician, occultist and poet Jhonn Balance (1962).

Being second can be harder than being first

Today in 1742, George II appointed the Earl of Wilmington as First Lord of the Treasury, five days after the formal resignation of Sir Robert Walpole. The latter’s 20-year stint as Britain’s first “prime minister” had come to an end when his government was defeated in the House of Commons on a relatively minor technical matter which Walpole chose to regard as a confidence issue, and he was created Earl of Orford and withdrew from front-line politics. The King wept when he departed.

To replace him at the head of the ministry, thereby unwittingly immortalised as the second Prime Minister of Great Britain, George turned to the Lord President of the Council, the Earl of Wilmington. Formerly Sir Spencer Compton, he was in his late 60s and had held office for more than a decade, before that having been Speaker of the House of Commons from 1715 to 1727. He had few enemies but equally few cheerleaders, and one contemporary described him as “a plodding, heavy fellow, with great application but no talents”.

Although he took office as First Lord of the Treasury, the post which every Prime Minister has formally held since Walpole (except the Earl of Chatham 1766-68 and the Marquess of Salisbury 1885-86, 1887-92 and 1895-1902), he was largely a figurehead. The driving force of the government was Lord Carteret, who had been appointed Secretary of State for the Northern Department a few days earlier. A skilful diplomatist who had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1724 to 1730, he had spent more than a decade out of favour, hated by Walpole and unwisely drawn into the tangled and fractious relationship between the King and Queen on the one hand and their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, on the other. In the early stages of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), he had supported the cause of the Austrian ruler Maria Theresa, Britain’s ally, on the grounds that her defeat would only give advantage to France, and this public stance had brought him eventually into the King’s favour.

Wilmington’s tenure even as nominal chief minister was brief and undistinguished. The House of Commons was controlled by opponents of the ministry, and Wilmington had little flair for leadership, and he was already ageing. For all his faults, he was dedicated and hard-working, but that began to take its toll on his health, and less than 17 months later, in 2 July 1743, he died at home in St James’s Square. He was succeeded by the Paymaster of the Forces, Henry Pelham, a close ally of Walpole and the younger brother of the Duke of Newcastle, but Carteret would remain the most powerful minister in the government until forced out of office in November 1744. Pelham remained Prime Minister until 1754, when he was succeeded by his brother.

Be careful what you vote for, señor

This day in 1936 saw the first round of voting for a general election in Spain. After the collapse of Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical government at the end of 1935 amid a succession of corruption scandals, the sexagenarian Liberal former Prosecutor General, Manuel Portela y Valladares, had attempted without success to form a stable centrist administration. Although the previous election had only been held in November 1933, the Cortes Generales was dissolved again.

The election campaign was bitter and divisive. The centrist parties were losing momentum to competitors on the left and right, and there was widespread violence, with 37 people being killed overall, including 10 on the day of the election itself. Each side raised the prospect of further unrest, perhaps even civil war, if they were defeated.

The various parties of the left largely coalesced into a larger electoral bloc. The Frente Popular, or Popular Front, brought together the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE), the Partido Comunista de España (Communist Party of Spain, or CSE), the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM), the Partido Sindicalista (Syndicalist Party), the Izquierda Republicana (Republican Left, or IR) and the Unión Republicana (Republican Union, or UR). It also had the support of Galician and Basque nationalist parties and the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers, or UGT).

The main opposition was the conservative Catholic Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights, or CEDA). The Partido Republicano Radical (Radical Republican Party, or PRR) had tried to occupy the centre ground but found itself drawing closer to CEDA, while some of its deputies had left to form the UR. Also struggling to remain independent of left and right was the Partido del Centro Democrático (Party of the Democratic Centre, PCD).

There were 473 seats available in the unicameral Cortes through a complicated electoral system which comprises multi-member regional constituencies in which voters could cast a number of a ballots, depending on the region. The first round of voting resulted in a narrow advantage for the Frente Popular, with around 4.7 million votes, over CEDA and its allies with around 4.5 million. The parties of the centre fared very badly and were effectively stripped of any influence. However, it began to look like the left would translate a slender margin in terms of votes into a substantial parliamentary majority, and the IR’s Manuel Azaña, who had previously been Prime Minister from 1931 to 1933 and had played a leading role in assembling the Frente Popular, began to form a new government.

How reliable and fair the election results were remains hotly contested. There were certainly accusations of widespread fraud but groups on the far right, alarmed by the Frente Popular’s electoral advantage and swift formation of a government, had already started to consider ways of overthrowing the democratic system rather than winning control of it. Equally, the left began to contemplate extra-parliamentary measures to keep conservatives out of power. In April 1936, the left-wing majority in the Cortes voted to remove the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora of the liberal, centrist Partido Republicano Progresista (Progressive Republican Party), and installed the Prime Minister, Manuel Azaña. Many conservatives now gave up on parliamentary politics, and in July there was a military coup, beginning in Morocco but quickly spreading to Spain itself, led by Generals José Sanjurjo, Emilio Mola and Francisco Franco. The country slid into a bloody civil war which would last until April 1939.

There would not be another parliamentary election in Spain until October 1967.

When the Last Frontier acts first

This is the 80th anniversary of the signing of the first anti-discrimination law in the United States in the 20th century. Ernest Gruening, Governor of the Alaska Territory (it would not become a state until 1959), signed into law the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, which prohibited and criminalised discrimination against individuals in public areas on grounds of race. Until that point, Alaska Natives had been subject to discrimination in a number of areas, with a separate education system and segregated public areas like swimming pools, theatres and playgrounds.

Two campaigning groups, the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Native Sisterhood, had led the pressure for reform of what were effectively a variant of Jim Crow laws. By 1943 they were being led by husband and wife Roy and Elizabeth Peratrovich, both Tlingit people whose roots were in the coastal area of south eastern Alaska and north western British Columbia. Gruening was supportive of the cause and in 1943 prompted a bill to ban discrimination to be introduced in the Territorial Legislature, but it was defeated.

Another bill was introduced into the House of the Territorial Legislature in 1945 by Rep. Edward Anderson. Lawmakers heard testimony including from the Peratroviches, and that of Elizabeth was considered to have been decisive. Senator Allen Shattuck of Juneau demanded:

Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilisation behind us?

Elizabeth Peratrovich’s response was crisp and devastating.

I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilisation behind them, of our Bill of Rights.

The bill passed. The Daily Alaska Empire reported that Peratrovich’s evidence had “shamed the opposition into a ‘defensive whisper’.”

Rejoice, just rejoice

Turning our attention celestially, there are relatively slender pickings. It is the feast of St Juliana of Nicomedia (AD 285-AD 304), who seems to have refused to cooperate with a marriage arranged by her pagan parents and was martyred as a result, being partially burned in flames, facially disfigured with a red-hot iron, plunged into boiling oil and then beheaded (and whose frustrated husband-to-be may later have been eaten by a lion); and until 2004, it was the feast of St Onesimus of Byzantium (d AD 107), a runaway slave who was converted by the Apostle Paul and became Bishop of Byzantium; however, the Roman Martyrology issued in 2004 lists his feast day as 15 February.

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, today is the Day of the Shining Star which commemorates the birth of Kim Jong Il, the country’s second Supreme Leader. It is marked with mass gymnastics, music performances, fireworks displays, military demonstrations and dancing parties, and citizens receive additional rations and supplies of electricity. Sounds fun. The period between the Day of the Shining Star and the Day of the Sun (15 April), which marks the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the state, is known as the Loyalty Festival Period.

Factoids

1. The Earl of Wilmington (see above), Prime Minister from 1742 to 1743, was the great-great-uncle and namesake of the only premier to be assassinated, Spencer Perceval, who held office from 1809 to 1812. Perceval is also the only former Attorney General to become Prime Minister, and the only premier to live his whole life (1762-1812) within the reign of one sovereign, George III (1760-1820).

2. Perceval was also, by general estimation, the shortest Prime Minister to have held office. Only 5’3”, he was nicknamed “Little P” (unfortunate) by the long-serving Lord Chancellor the Earl of Eldon (1801-06, 1807-27), though he was matched in stature, it has been reported, by the blink-and-you-missed-her Liz Truss. It is worth balancing that by pointing out that Margaret Thatcher was only 5’4” or 5’5”, while Winston Churchill was barely an inch taller.

3. Lord Wilmington died unmarried, his earldom and other hereditary titles becoming extinct on his death. Of the 58 men and women generally recognised as having been prime ministers, only three others never married: William Pitt the Younger (1783-1801, 1804-06), A.J. Balfour (1902-05) and Edward Heath (1970-74). All three female prime ministers (Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss) have been married.

4. Lord Eldon, barely remembered except by constitutional scholars and historians today, was an exceptional man. Born John Scott in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he came from surprisingly modest circumstances, his father rising from fitter’s apprentice to millionaire businessman and merchant, and attended my old school, Newcastle Royal Grammar School, where his success relied more on a good memory than diligent application (ahem). After being called to the Bar, he was Member of Parliament for Weobley in Herefordshire from 1782 to 1799 and served as Solicitor General and Attorney General under William Pitt the Younger. Ennobled as Lord Eldon, he then enjoyed a politico-judicial career of exceptional longevity, as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1799-1801) then, apart from a 14-month period in 1806-07, Lord Chancellor for the following 26 years. He resigned aged 75 over George Canning’s support for Catholic emancipation, but was still disappointed not to receive office under the Duke of Wellington in 1828 or Sir Robert Peel in 1834. He died just over three years later at the age of 86. An impressive life for the grandson of a water-carrier from the Newcastle quayside.

5. Until the passage of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, the Lord High Chancellor was the antithesis of the separation of powers: he was a member of the executive, the head of the judiciary and the presiding officer of the House of Lords. In this last function he was superseded by the Lord Speaker, but under the provisions of the House of Lords Precedence Act 1539 the Lord Chancellor was able to fulfil the role even if not himself a member of the Lords. Occupants of the office falling into this category include Sir Thomas More (1529-32), Sir Thomas Audley (1533-44 but only a peer from 1538), Sir Thomas Bromley (1579-87), Sir Christopher Hatton (1587-91) and Sir Nathan Wright (1700-05).

6. After Wright, Lord Chancellors were always either peers on appointment or ennobled shortly thereafter until June 2007. When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, he appointed Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn, as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, the post’s judicial and parliamentary functions having been removed two years before.

7. The shortest tenure as Lord Chancellor was that of Charles Yorke, MP for Reigate (1747-68) then Cambridge University (1768-70) and the second son of the Earl of Hardwicke who had been Lord Chancellor from 1737 to 1756. Having served as Solicitor General and Attorney General, Yorke was offered the chancellorship by the Duke of Grafton in 1770 when the Earl Camden was dismissed for supporting a motion critical of the government of which he was a member. Yorke had made a promise to the former Prime Minister the Marquess of Rockingham that he would not accept office under Grafton; however, George III put him under enormous pressure, warning him that if he refused he would never again be offered the position his father had held. Reluctantly Yorke yielded to persuasion and kissed hands as Lord Chancellor on 17 January 1770, and letters patent were drafted ennobling him as Baron Morden. He was deeply unhappy and quarrelled violently with his brother over his acceptance of office, and became acutely unwell. On 19 January, he began vomiting blood, perhaps from a vessel ruptured while retching, and he died the next day, having been Lord Chancellor for three days. Despite his illness, there were rumours that he had committed suicide in despair at his situation.

8. There have so far been only two female Lord Chancellors, Liz Truss (2016-17) and the current incumbent Shabana Mahmood. When Truss was appointed—like her immediate predecessors Chris Grayling and Michael Gove, she was not a lawyer—she was the first woman to hold the job substantively, and the first to exercise its functions since Queen Eleanor, the wife of Henry III, had done so as Regent of England in 1254 while the King was absent in Gascony suppressing a rebellion. Some records omit the Queen’s tenure but the extant commission is quite clear that Henry III left the Great Seal “in custodia dilectae Reginae nostrae”, “in the keeping of our beloved Queen”. Although she delegated the routine sealing of writs and common instruments to the Archdeacon of Coventry, William of Kilkenny, the records show that she sat in a judicial capacity in the Aula Regia, the King’s Court, both before and after she gave birth to a daughter, Katherine, in November 1253.

9. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (see above) is the only country in the world in which the constitutionally named president is dead. Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean state who served as its Supreme Leader from 1948 and as President from 1972, died in 1994. Four years later, the preamble to the constitution was amended to stipulate that “the Korean people will uphold the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung as the eternal President of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”. The late Christopher Hitchens described North Korea as a “necrocracy”.

10. The universally recognised emergency telephone number in the United States, 9-1-1, is of surprisingly recent vintage. The National Association of Fire Chiefs had called for a single emergency number in the 1950s, but there was additional and shocking impetus in March 1964 when a 28-year-old woman, Kitty Genovese, was raped and stabbed outside her apartment block in Queens, New York. Although later debunked, a story in The New York Times reported that 38 witnesses either heard or saw the attack, which lasted for more than half an hour, but none attempted to intervene or called the police. Some experts suggested that one reason was the lack of a single telephone number, with any witness instead having to contact the local police precinct where the response would be dependent on the officer who answered. In 1967, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommended the establishment of an emergency number, and later that year the Federal Communications Commission and telecommunications giant AT&T began discussions over what the number should be. In 1968, it was agreed that it should be 9-1-1, which was easy to remember and to dial on a rotary telephone; the middle number 1 indicated an abbreviated dialling number (like 4-1-1 for directory inquiries and 6-1-1 to report a fault). Initially it applied only to AT&T’s Bell System telephone network, with other providers free to adopt it if they wished. One company which did so was the Alabama Telephone Company, which set up a pilot in Haleyville, Alabama. Today in 1968, the first 9-1-1 call was made, when Rankin Fite, Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, made the ceremonial inaugural call. It was answered by Rep Tom Bevill, member of the United States House of Representatives for Alabama’s 7th district.

“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.” (Oscar Wilde)

1. “The mysterious life of John R. Bradley”: a strange tale by Lara Prendergast in The Spectator, about a journalist and author specialising in the Middle East. John R. Bradley is still listed as alive in his Wikipedia entry, though it refers to his withdrawal from public life due to ill health in 2015. But Prendergast unfolds a story which is mysterious and complicated, of a kind which is rare in the age of the internet, shedding some light on Bradley’s youth and education. Towards the end of 2020, she received an email from a man in Mexico from whom Bradley had rented a house, informing her that he had died after suffering from dengue fever and kidney problems. Much of his life remains shrouded in uncertainty, but it has encouraged me to go back and look at his work for the magazine at a fascinating time for events in the Middle East.

2. “Has the Chagos Islands deal killed progressive realism?”: the ongoing brouhaha over the government’s plan to cede sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius has unleashed an improbable firestorm of commentary and made armchair strategists and international jurists of the most unlikely people, but this article in The Critic by academics David Blagden and Patrick Porter is a useful and brisk summation. It also links the BIOT deal to the wider project, outlined last year by then-Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, of “progressive realism”, which always to me smacked of an inherent contradiction, like Jews for Jesus or a long-service medal for kamikaze pilots. I was not alone in thinking at the time that Lammy was trying to square a circle, and the authors of this piece demonstrate carefully and meticulously how the policy has unravelled at first touch. I suspect Sir Keir Starmer would have been incredulous if told last July that one of the most controversial issues of his first half-year in office would be British Overseas Territories, yet here we are. (I made my own contribution to the subject in The Critic here.)

3. “How to understand Elon Musk”: Richard Waters in The Financial Times grapples with a straightforward but challenging question: what is Musk about? I have struggled to find an easy answer. There are those who choose to mock or dismiss President Trump’s current right hand, which seems slightly presumptuous given that Musk is by some distance the richest man in the world and is therefore obviously doing something right. As Waters explains, though, he is no ideological soulmate of Trump or the wider MAGA movement (something I argued in The Hill last year), nor is he motivated by unalloyed financial and commercial self-interest. There is clearly some kind of philosophical impulse driving his manic leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but it seems to be mingled with a more visceral set of priorities too. The Trump/Musk axis may not endure—I suspect there will be some kind of implosion before the mid-terms—but it is currently one of the most powerful influences in Washington and we need to unpick it as best we can.

4. “The Civil Service Fast Stream has failed”: this guest post in The Pimlico Journal by an anonymous current civil servant caught my eye partly because I am the sort of person who is genuinely interested in civil service reform and partly because my path to becoming a clerk in the House of Commons was through the Fast Stream, albeit 20 years ago. It also echoes observations about the Fast Stream I have heard from friends who have worked in Whitehall. The author has distinctive and unapologetic views with which not every reader will agree (though I largely did), but his broader point seems powerfully persuasive: what should be a highly selective, elite graduate-entry scheme to the nation’s bureaucracy simply isn’t functioning as one, and is regarded by the civil service in general as a curiosity at best and an inconvenience at worst. There should be a way of recruiting brilliant, innovative and dedicated people to deal with some of the knottiest problems the state faces, but I don’t think anyone would argue that the Fast Stream in its current incarnation is that way. It needs to be.

5. “Eat the Slop”: the intellectual curiosity of Kara Kennedy Clairmont never rests, as I have come to realise, and as a new mother she had started a podcast-and-blog combo with Bethany Mandel entitled The Mom Wars. Parenthood, it strikes me, is a striking victim of the explosion of available information which technology has brought us over the last 30 years or so, with the challenge changing from where to find advice to evaluating the torrent of advice which is forthcoming. This short but honest and wise piece deals with the anxieties of what to feed babies when they move to solid food (whenever that is, I’m not good on early development) and identifies the rabbit holes a conscientious parent can so easily fall down. What strikes me as a sensible solution prevails, a reminder that children are in the main pretty resilient or we wouldn’t all be here. “I’ll let you know if in twenty years my lazy mom solution gives her poor gut health.”

“Film spectators are quiet vampires.” (Jim Morrison)

(Note: once again I have watched very little television this week. Instead, therefore, here are five films, not all prompted by anything in particular, which, if you haven’t already, you really should watch.)

1. “Beverly Hills Cop”: I was writing an article for CulturAll (to be published anon) which partly concerns the making of this 1984 action comedy classic. I was prompted to go back and watch it in full, and it was a heartening reminder that, more than 40 years later, it holds up as a startlingly good film: crisp, sharp, funny, dramatic and coming in at a punchy one hour 45 minutes. It’s amazing to think that Eddie Murphy was only 23 when the film was released, and had only appeared in three films previously (the durable 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, and the ill-advised Best Defense). He was, of course, primarily a stand-up comedian, famous for his appearances on Saturday Night Live, and he brings that crackling vitality, as well as the confidence of youth, to Beverly Hills Cop. The late John Ashton and Ronny Cox are solid in supporting roles and Steven Berkoff leaves nothing off the table as the villain; Judge Reinhold divides opinion. It’s just a very well crafted, effective and entertaining film, better than it has any need to be and with very little excess weight.

2. “The Right Stuff”: last week’s round-up included an Esquire article by the godfather of the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe. This 1983 film is adapted from his book of the same name, written four years before, and it tells the story of the American test pilots who took part in aeronautical research to break the sound barrier and then undertake manned space flight. At its centre are seven outrageously intrepid and determined flyers, Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), Virgil “Gus” Grissom (Fred Ward), Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), Walter “Wally” Schirra (Lance Henriksen) and Donald “Deke” Slayton (Scott Paulin). Written and directed by Philip Kaufman, The Right Stuff captures perfectly the larky courage, intense competition, brooding machismo and ever-present danger with which the pilots lived. Their job was to go far beyond the bounds of what had previously been thought physically or mechanically possible, whatever the cost. The result is a deeply textured, three-dimensional portrayal of life lived on and beyond the edge by men who simply couldn’t walk away from a challenge.

3. “Picnic at Hanging Rock”: rereleased in cinemas to celebrate its 50th anniversary is this eerily wonderful Peter Weir film based on a novel by Joan Lindsay. On Valentine’s Day 1900, a group of schoolgirls from Appleyard College near Mount Macedon in Victoria go on an outing to Hanging Rock. The teacher, Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) and three of the girls then go missing, sparking an intense and increasingly desperate search, but they are never found. The film explores the after-effects on the other girls and the local community, but it is an example of a work in which the plot is somehow secondary to an overall sense and aesthetic. The heat and sunshine of Australia are portrayed brilliantly and there is a strange, hypnotic weight to the atmosphere, making it feel unreal but deeply unsettling. Rachel Roberts and Jackie Weaver are particularly compelling as two of the schoolgirls but the real laurels go to Weir for creating such a distinctive piece of Australian New Wave cinema. Go and see it.

4. “La Haine”: showing next week at Leicester Square’s beleaguered Prince Charles Cinema is Mathieu Kassovitz’s bleak, brutal 1995 social thriller which shows a day and night in the lives of three friends from a poor immigrant neighbourhood in the desolate banlieues outside Paris. Vincent Cassel is outstanding at Vinz, a young Jewish man with a hatred for the police and a fixation on Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, who has found a revolver lost in a recent riot and intends to use it to kill a police officer if a young man injured in the disturbance dies. It is a grim and violent tale with an ambiguous resolution, but the depiction of the despair and hopelessness, and the aggression into which they can curdle, among isolated and impoverished communities is compelling. Very far from a feel-good film but a stunning work of cinema.

5. “Witchfinder General”: a film perhaps better remembered through its parodies now, this folk horror directed by Michael Reeves stars Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious young man who in the mid-1640s travelled throughout East Anglia styling himself “Witchfinder General”, a title he had assumed on his own initiative, seeking out and prosecuting instances of witchcraft. Ian Ogilvy is Richard Marshall, a soldier pursuing Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne (Robert Russell). Despite the film’s very modest budget of £100,000, it captures the confusion and dislocation of the English Civil War, the paranoia and internecine conflict it provoked, and the power of supernatural forces in early modern society. Price is genuinely sinister and relentless as the Witchfinder and any memories of a campy romp are dispelled by the violence of his crusade. A much better film than you might recall.

Only in the agony of parting…

… as George Eliot said, do we look into the depths of love. Hopefully this agony is not too acute. It will not be long, I am quite sure. E go bi nah, as speakers of Nigerian Pidgin say.