Sunday round-up 2 March 2025

Jon Bon Jovi, Lembit Öpik and Daniel Craig celebrate birthdays, it is the feast of top North-Eastern cleric St Chad and US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation

Ticking off another milestone on the journey to inevitable death and bodily corruption today are some fun kids including veteran BBC journalist and arts administrator Sir John Tusa (89), novelist and screenwriter John Irving (83), footballer and manager Harry Redknapp (78), former United States senator for Wisconsin Russ Feingold (72), singer, actor, producer and, yes, one of them Jay Osmond (70), golfer Ian Woosnam (67), singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and actor Jon Bon Jovi (63), journalist and one-time Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme Paul Farrelly (63), Prime Minister of Australia Anthony Albanese (62), former Liberal Democrat MP and all-round “personality” Lembit Öpik (60), actor and departing 007 star Daniel Craig (57), former cabinet minister and university administrator James Purnell (55), presenter and comedian Dave Gorman (54), rapper and songwriter Method Man (54), lead singer and co-founder of Coldplay Chris Martin (48), actress and screenwriter Rebel Wilson (45), actress Bryce Dallas Howard (44), X Factor winner James Arthur (37), splendidly named Cantopop singer Windy Zhan (19) and third in line to the throne of Norway Prince Oscar, Duke of Skåne (9).

You can cross off your birthday card list St Benedict (AD 480), the Netherlands’ only pontiff Pope Adrian VI (1459), imperial knight and early ally of German Protestantism Franz von Sickingen (1481), diplomat, scholar and library founder Sir Thomas Bodley (1545), judge, politician and legal reformer the Earl of Mansfield (1705), first President of the Republic of Texas Sam Houston (1793), oldest verifiable pontiff Pope Leo XIII (1810), Czech nationalist composer and pianist Bedřich Smetana (1824), controversial fash-adjacent-or-not pontiff Pope Pius XII, composer Kurt Weill (1900), writer, poet and illustrator Dr Seuss (1904), actor, singer and producer Desi Arnaz (1917), former Abbot of Ampleforth and Archbishop of Westminster Basil Cardinal Hume (1923), writer and pioneer of “New Journalism” Tom Wolfe (1930), last leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev (1931), singer-songwriter, guitarist and heroin enthusiast Lou Reed (1942), musically versatile guitar virtuoso Rory Gallagher (1948) and singer and drummer Karen Carpenter (1950).

The kids are all white

On this day 55 years ago, in 1970, Rhodesia became a republic and broke its final, strained links with the British Crown. It was enacting a decision taken by referendum on 24 June 1969, and the interim President of Rhodesia was 64-year-old Clifford Dupont. Born in London and qualifying as a solicitor in 1929, he had emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in the early 1950s, having already bought a farm at Featherstone, south of the capital, Salisbury (now Harare). He was elected to the Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federal Assembly for the Dominion Party in 1958, then to the Legislative Assembly of Rhodesia in 1962 for the Rhodesian Front as the federation disintegrated. He was immediately appointed Minister of Justice, served as Second Deputy Prime Minister in 1964-65 and in November 1965 became Acting Officer Administering the Government.

November 1965 was the month in which the hard-line Prime Minister, Ian Smith, implacably opposed to any movement towards majority rule and the staunchest defender of the white minority in Rhodesia, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Rhodesia (Southern Rhodesia until 1964) had been a self-governing British colony since 1923, but the government in London was now set on decolonisation, with the proviso that there could be “no independence before majority rule”. Smith, like many white Rhodesians, resented being denied their autonomy, and UDI was the result.

The Governor of Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, a former member of the Legislative Assembly, quite properly regarded this declaration as an act of treason, and used his viceregal powers to dismiss Smith and his government. But he was without influence and ignored, and Smith, who maintained that he was loyal to the Queen, replaced the Governor with his Deputy Prime Minister, Dupont, in the office of Acting Officer Administering the Government. The United Kingdom withdrew its High Commission staff from Salisbury, with most diplomatic missions following suit, and the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning Smith’s administration as an “illegal racist minority régime”. South Africa and Portugal, the latter still committed to Africa with colonies in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea and São Tomé and Príncipe, gave the new régime some discreet economic and military support, not a single country formally recognised Rhodesia’s independence, leaving it an international pariah.

Smith wanted Dupont to be Governor General, but the Queen refused even to consider it, and Gibbs gamely remained in residence in Government House in Salisbury until 1970, under virtual house arrest but refusing to acknowledge Smith’s administration (which, in his view and in legal theory, he had dismissed). In December 1966 and October 1968, there were talks between the British government and Rhodesia but it proved impossible to reach a settlement acceptable to both sides. Despite the instinctive loyalty to the Crown of most white Rhodesians, many began to see the futility of attempting to remain within the British monarchy, leading to the 1969 referendum on establishing a republic: breaking with the Crown was supported by 61,130 votes to 14,327, while 54,724 voted in favour of a new constitution with 20,776 against.

The Parliament of Rhodesia elected Dupont as President substantively on 14 April, but it was a purely ceremonial post, and executive power lay with the Prime Minister (Ian Smith would remain in power until 1979). After suffering increasingly poor health, Dupont stepped down as President on 31 December 1975, dying in June 1978. The country did not long outlive him. UDI was never recognised, and after increasingly violent guerrilla warfare against the government by the armed wings of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) under Joshua Nkomo and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) of Robert Mugabe, peace talks brokered by the new Conservative government in London led to the Lancaster House Agreement in December 1979. UDI was nullified and British rule was reimposed for a period to allow the organisation of democratic elections.

The recently renamed Zimbabwe-Rhodesia reverted for a few months to being the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, and the Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Soames, was temporarily appointed Governor of Southern Rhodesia. In April 1980 the Republic of Zimbabwe was established; the Methodist minister Canaan Banana assumed the ceremonial role of President of Zimbabwe while Robert Mugabe became Prime Minister and head of the government. (I wrote about the Lancaster House Agreement for The Spectator a year ago.)

One must not be a name-dropper, as Her Majesty remarked to me yesterday

Today in 2012 saw the death at 82 of former Conservative cabinet minister Lord St John of Fawsley. As Norman St John Stevas, he was Member of Parliament for Chelmsford from 1964 to 1987 and sat in Margaret Thatcher’s first cabinet for 20 months as Leader of the House of Commons. As a politician, he was, in the words of his obituarist Edward Pearce in The Guardian, “as vivid a personality as politics can bear”, and his time in high office was short, but he is remembered with a degree of reverence by those (like me) with an interest in and dedication to Parliament because he was the driving force behind the establishment of the system of departmental House of Commons select committees which are now such an integral part of our legislative and scrutiny process.

Norman Panayea St John Stevas was born in London on 18 May 1929, the son of Spyro Stevas, an hotelier of Greek descent, and Kitty St John O’Connor, “the same birthday,” he would remark, “as his late Martyred Imperial Majesty Nicholas II”. It will surprise none of you that he was closer to his mother, an Irish Catholic, than his father. He was an academically brilliant boy and young man: after Ratcliffe College, a fee-paying Catholic school in Leicestershire, he spent six months at the Venerable English College in Rome in preparation for the priesthood, but found he had no vocation. None daunted, he won a first in law from Fitzwilliam Hall, Cambridge, being awarded the Whitlock Prize and elected President of the Cambridge Union.

He packed a seemingly impossible collection of scholarly achievements into the 1950s. He read for the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law, a demanding postgraduate qualification, at Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1952. He lectured in law at Southampton University (1952-53) and King’s College London (1953-56), was a tutor in jurisprudence at Christ Church (1953-55) and Merton College, Oxford (1955-57), became a Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD) at Yale Law School and was awarded a PhD by the University of London for a thesis on the early works of Walter Bagehot entitled “A study of censorship with special reference to the law governing obscene publications in common law and other jurisdictions”. In addition, he lectured at Stanford University in California and was from 1954 to 1959 legal adviser to a committee of the Society of Authors chaired by Sir Alan (A.P.) Herbert advocating reform of the law on literary censorship.

In 1959, aged only 30, Stevas joined The Economist as legal and political correspondent, but he wanted to be a practitioner as well as a commentator. He had been a founding member of the Bow Group in 1951 and at the general election that October was the Conservative candidate for Dagenham, losing soundly to Labour former minister John Parker. In 1964, however, he succeeded the first-class cricketer and footballer Sir Hubert Ashton as MP for Chelmsford, a moderately safe Conservative seat in Essex which would gradually become more marginal until hthe majority at his final election in 1983 was only 378.

Now 35, he was a perplexing figure: dazzlingly learned, erudite and witty, he was a devout Catholic, often speaking in defence of the Church in public, and consequently opposed both the Abortion Act 1967 championed by David Steel and Leo Abse’s Divorce Reform Act 1969. At the same time, he opposed capital punishment and immigration restrictions based on race, supported relaxation of the obscenity laws and was a co-sponsor of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 which legalised homosexual acts between consenting adults.

But Stevas did not find political preferment, perhaps occupied by his intellectual pursuits—he was a prolific author and between 1965 and 1986 edited the 15-volume The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot for Harvard University Press—but also perhaps because of a profound inability to take anything entirely seriously. He was flamboyant, arch, amusing, waspish, grand and more than slightly camp, an inveterate name-dropper who scattered Latin dicta through his speech like confetti and held out his ringed hand to be kissed as if he were a mediaeval prelate. It was not until November 1972 that he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science, his ministerial chief being Margaret Thatcher. The following June he was promoted within the department to minister of state and made Minister for the Arts, a role for which he was ideally suited by inclination and sensibility, but the Heath government fell within a year and Edward Heath himself was gone within two.

Stevas was appointed Shadow Education Secretary by Heath in 1974, and supported him to remain as leader in the first ballot of the leadership contest of February 1975 but switched his vote to his former superior, Thatcher, in the second round after Heath withdrew. Although they had been departmental colleagues, Stevas and Thatcher had almost nothing in common: he was an avowed “One Nation” Tory in the Disraelian tradition and dismissive of monetarist economic policies, expansive and flippant where Thatcher was sombre and meticulous. She retained him as Shadow Education Secretary but appointed as his deputy the former headmaster Dr Rhodes Boyson, an old-fashioned disciplinarian with a broad Lancashire accent and mutton-chop whiskers. Boyson was a proponent of corporal punishment, despised social workers and described homosexuality as “wrong biblically” and “unnatural”. He and Stevas hated each other, the latter ironically nicknaming the former “Colossus”.

In November 1978, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, John Davies, resigned from the front bench after being diagnosed with a brain tumour (he would die the following July), and Francis Pym was promoted to replace him. Thatcher moved Stevas into Pym’s former role as Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, a comfortable fit for a genial constitutionalist and scholar of Bagehot. But there was a critical element of timing too. Select committees were as old an institution as the House of Commons itself but did not form a systematic network of detailed scrutiny.

In July 1978, the Procedure Committee had published a report which recommended setting up 12 select committees to examine government policy in a manner roughly aligned with Whitehall departments. The Leader of the House, Michael Foot, was unconvinced by the notion but the government would eventually grant two days to debate the idea in March 1979. Stevas, on the other hand, seized on the proposal and threw the Opposition’s support behind it, promising to implement the new structure if his party was returned to office.

In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher duly led the Conservatives to a general election victory and became the country’s first female prime minister (and only the sixth anywhere in the world), and she appointed Stevas Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as well as returning to his old role as Minister for the Arts. There is no evidence that Thatcher was enthusiastic about the more rigorous and coherent scrutiny to which departmental select committees might subject the government, but she had allowed the plan to be included in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto and, once in office, she did nothing to hinder Stevas as he set about his task.

On 25 June 1979, the House debated and approved motions establishing (at first) 13 select committees to hold the main departments of state to account, and after a debate on 26 November the first members were nominated to the committees. Reading Stevas’s speech on 25 June, it is clear that he thought it was an historic day: he called the proposal “a series of changes that could constitute the most important parliamentary reforms of the century”, but reassured colleagues (and perhaps himself) that “they constitute a major change, although that change is of an evolutionary and not a revolutionary kind”. More than 45 years later, departmental select committees are still in place, have grown in stature and influence and, as I wrote in The New Statesman in 2017, are one of the most valuable elements of the House’s work in holding the government to account.

If departmental select committees have endured, Stevas did not. In January 1981, Thatcher carried out her first (modest) cabinet reshuffle. Angus Maude, the Paymaster General who had chaired the Conservative Research Department in opposition, retired, then in his late 1960s. Stevas was also released from his ministerial duties. He was not in sympathy with Thatcher’s economic policies, and had made little effort to conceal it. Perhaps more seriously, while he regarded her with a degree of affection, he had failed to treat the Prime Minister wholly seriously, referring to her as “the Leaderene” and “Tina”, an acronym for her famous phrase “There is no alternative”. Combined with his natural flamboyance and exuberant style, they made him a poor fit for the Thatcher cabinet. The Prime Minister said to the art historian Roy Strong, “Norman was too much. Look at the way he’d done his office up. No sense of economy.”

So his ministerial career came to an end. In 1987 he retired from the House of Commons and was ennobled as Lord St John of Fawsley. Nor was he idle: he served as Chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission (1985-99) and Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1991 to 1996. In total he had spent less than four years in ministerial office, yet, by pursuing the dry and unglamorous procedural issue of establishing departmental select committees, he had more influence on public and political life than the vast majority of his colleagues, even those who rose higher and stayed longer.

We gon’ celebrate and have a good time

For those of you heavily into intercessory prayer—and it’s always worth a shot, right?—today it is the feast of St Chad of Mercia (d. AD 672), likely born to Northumbrian aristocracy, a student of St Aidan on Lindisfarne, who travelled to Ireland, became a monk and was Abbot of Lastingham in North Yorkshire, Bishop of the Northumbrians and then Bishop of the Mercians until his death in Lichfield, having foreseen his end; St John Maron (AD 628-AD 707), born in the Byzantine city of Sarmin where his father Agathon was governor, who became a monk at the Monastery of St Maron in Antioch and first Patriarch of the Maronite Church; St Agnes of Bohemia (1211-82), daughter of King Ottokar I, who was betrothed to Henry, King of Germany, then touted as a queen for Henry III of England but pursued by Emperor Frederick II, then founded a convent of Poor Clares in Prague and lived out her life there, latterly as abbess, tending to lepers and paupers; and St Angela of the Cross (1846-1932), born in Seville to a poor family, who worked in a shoe repair shop before taking religious vows with the Daughters of Charity and establishing a community of nuns to serve the poor and sick of her home city.

In Texas it is Texas Independence Day, commemorating the establishment of the Republic of Texas separate from Mexico in 1836. Ethiopia today celebrates Adwa Victory Day in honour of Emperor Menelik II’s defeat of a smaller invading Italian army near Adwa in 1896 which prevented for a while European colonisation of the Horn of Africa. In Sri Lanka it is Air Force Day, marking the establishment in 1951 of the Royal Ceylon Air Force (George VI was King of Ceylon 1948-52 and Her late Majesty Elizabeth II was Queen of Ceylon from 1952 until it became the Republic of Sri Lanka in May 1972). And, it being the birthday of Dr Seuss (see above), in the United States it is National Read Across America Day.

Factoids

1. Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the conviction of Dr Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who divulged atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and after the Second World War. Having joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1932, he fled his home country the following year as Nazi persecution of Communists got underway and earned a doctorate in physics under Professor Nevill Mott at the University of Bristol. In 1941 he was recruited to work on Tube Alloys, the Anglo-Canadian nuclear programme, moving to the Manhattan Project in 1943; but from 1942 to 1949, he was passing classified information to the USSR. In early 1950, he confessed his espionage and was arrested for breaching the Official Secrets Act 1939, saying “Knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of mankind”. He pled guilty to four counts of breaching the act and his trial lasted less than 90 minutes. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, sentenced him to 14 years’ imprisonment, the maximum penalty for espionage, and explained that he could not have been charged with treason—then a capital offence—because the Soviet Union was an ally of the United Kingdom when he had committed his crimes. Fuchs was released in 1959 after serving nine years and four months of his sentence and emigrated to the German Democratic Republic where he enjoyed a distinguished scientific career. He died in East Berlin in 1988, aged 76.

2. Fuchs was born in Rüsselsheim am Main, now a town of 67,000 in the Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region which covers territory in three of the Federal Republic of Germany’s sixteen Länder, the State of Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and the Free State of Bavaria. At Fuchs’s birth in 1911, however, Rüsselsheim lay in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine, a constitutional monarchy within the German Empire ruled by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig. Its executive was led by the Minister-President, alongside the Minister of Internal Affairs, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Finance. There was a bicameral legislature, the Landstände, comprising an Upper Chamber of hereditary, appointed, elected and ex officio members and a Lower Chamber chosen by direct election; however, in theory the Landstände was only an advisory body to the Grand Duke, in whose name laws were issued. When the German Empire was formed in 1871, Hesse was the sixth-largest state with only two per cent of its population, and it lost most of its autonomy to the imperial government.

3. Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig was the son of Grand Duke Ludwig IV and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, his maternal grandparents being Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the Prince Consort. His nickname was “Ernie” (genuinely). He had four sisters, one of whom, Princess Alexandra, married Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, and was murdered with him and their children in Yekaterinburg in 1918. Another sister, Princess Victoria, married Prince Louis of Battenberg, later created Marquess of Milford Haven, and was the mother of Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma. A third sister, Princess Irene, married Prince Heinrich of Prussia, younger brother of the German Emperor, and the fourth, Princess Elisabeth, married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, uncle of her sister’s husband Tsar Nicholas. Elisabeth was canonised by the Patriarch of Moscow in 1992. Last November, journalist and historian Frances Welch published a biographical study of the four sisters, The Lives and Deaths of the Princesses of Hesse: The curious destinies of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters.

4. Lord Goddard, who presided at Klaus Fuchs’s trial, was Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales from 1946 to 1958, having been a High Court judge in the King’s Bench Division (1932-38), a Lord Justice of Appeal (1938-44) and a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (1944-46). A brilliant lawyer, he was also a domineering bully who favoured punitive sentencing. According to his clerk, he had a tendency to ejaculate when passing a death sentence, necessitating the provision of a spare pair of trousers.

5. On this day in 1657, just nine-and-a-half years before the Great Fire of London, the capital of the Tokugawa shogunate, Edo (now Tokyo), was devastated by the Great Fire of Meireki, which burned for three days. Edo and London were of comparable population sizes, somewhere over 300,000, but the Great Fire of London, while it burned for slightly longer at four days, caused an official death toll only in single figures (though some historians believe it must have been much higher). The Great Fire of Meireki, by contrast, killed around 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants.

6. The English words “warranty” and “guarantee” are virtually synonymous, but, more than that, they are effectively the same word. Both derive from the Old French word guarantie, which in Norman French sometimes became warrantie, themselves in turn coming from the Frankish word *warjan, to ward off or defend against.

7. More etymological fun: the French word la question is generally and straightforwardly translated as “question” in the sense of request for information, but until the late 18th century it had a much more specialised meaning in the judicial system: it meant “torture”. France’s penal code allowed for two instances of judicial torture, la question préparatoire, to extract a confession from the accused of the capital crimes of murder, treason, violent robbery or witchcraft, and la question préalable, applied to those already convicted just before execution in order to obtain the names of any accomplices. These were not punitive actions but part of a system of proofs or preuves légales. If there was substantial but not decisive proof of guilt, evidence obtained by the imposition of torture through la question préparatoire was regarded as conclusive. The torture was always carried out in the presence of a magistrat instructeur and judicial representatives, but to observe secrecy the accused was not allowed to have a lawyer present. By the 18th century there would be a doctor or surgeon in attendance to ensure the life of the accused was not endangered. Any confession obtained following la question préparatoire had to be repeated without coercion in order to be valid.

8. Judicial torture had been widely practised in France since the Middle Ages, but there was no formalised penal code until 1670. The Ordonnance criminelle registered by the Parlement of Paris on 26 August that year made provision for torture, coming into force on 1 January 1671. La question préparatoire was abolished by royal edict on 24 August 1780, while la question préalable was suppressed in May 1788. A decree of the National Constituent Assembly on 9 October 1789 reiterated the abolition of this form of judicial torture.

9. There was no standardised method of judicial torture and much regional variation was to be found, but most fell into the category euphemistically known as “extension”: generally either the rack or l’estrapade, by which victim, hands tied behind them, were hoisted into the air with weights attached to their feet or dropped suddenly. Thumbscrews, designed to crush thumbs, fingers and toes, were sometimes used, while within the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, the most common methods were extension avec l’eau, an early form of waterboarding, and les brodequins, which involved fastening each of the victim’s legs between two planks of wood then hammering wedges into any gaps. This could create enough pressure to shatter bones. There are also recorded instances of foot-roasting, sleep deprivation, the application of boiling oil or scalding irons and being roasted in an iron chair.

10. The use of judicial torture and the hierarchical and grisly methods of execution prescribed by the Ancien Régime’s criminal code were part of the inspiration for a proposal to the National Assembly in October 1789 that those condemned to death should all be beheaded, regardless of rank, “by means of a simple mechanism”. The proposal was made by a deputy representing Paris, a 51-year-old physician from Saintes named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. He opposed capital punishment altogether but, realising there was no prospect of its immediate abolition, sought to make the process as humane as possible. Although he championed the use of a simple mechanical means of decapitation, he did not invent the guillotine; the prototype was designed by a German engineer, Tobias Schmidt, and the King’s physician Antoine Louis. At first known as a louisette, it initially had a curved blade but Louis XVI (demonstrating extraordinary foresight?) suggested a straight, angled blade be used instead. The King was executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793 in the Place de la Révolution; contrary to popular myth, Guillotin did not die under the blade of the device which bore his name, but succumbed to a carbuncle at his home in Paris in 1814, aged 75.

“I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.” (Henry R. Luce)

1. “J.D. Vance’s Double Standard on Ancestral Loyalty”: in The National Review, former attorney Dan McLaughlin pushes back firmly and thoughtfully at Vice-President J.D. Vance’s simplistic assertion that Americans can have only one loyalty, to the United States, and argues that while that must be a citizen’s primary attachment, it is unfair, unrealistic and illogical to expect people to shed any last vestige of affection and sympathy for ancestry elsewhere. So much of the Make America Great Again platform is aggressively, almost performatively simplistic, with a shiver-inducing undercurrent of disdain for complex thought or erudition, which makes this careful conservative critique valuable, refreshing and, for me, very resonant and persuasive.

2. “America’s portfolio rebalanced”: another excellent and thought-provoking proposition from Thomas. P.M. Barnett’s reliable Global Throughlines Substack. Barnett starts from the hypothesis that Donald Trump, with his roots in property, sees the world in terms of assets and liabilities, and is pursuing a foreign policy which will see the United States relinquish liabilities in the Eastern Hemisphere by, for example, disengaging in Europe, relying more on Israel and Saudi Arabia to take a lead in the Middle East and all-but-ignoring Africa, while it consolidates its position in the Western Hemisphere: addressing the drug cartels in Mexico, attempting to exercise greater dominance over Canada and Greenland and asserting supposed rights over the Panama Canal. I don’t know if Tom is right, but it’s an intriguing thesis and one to consider as events unfold.

3. “Vienna: the crucible of the modern world”: in Engelsberg Ideas, historian and journalist Richard Cockett examines the Austrian capital between the world wars, where a vibrant intellectual and artistic tumult produced not just creativity and innovation but political instability and extremism. In particular, “Red Vienna” stood out as a left-inclined city in a country increasingly turning to the right (a common enough feature of capital cities). Cockett tracks the fates of many who fled Vienna as authoritarianism grew more powerful, especially after the Anschluß of March 1938, and their extraordinary contributions to the modern world.

4. “Bingham’s Failed Revolution”: Dr David Starkey argues in The Critic that a once-nebulous concept, the “rule of law”, has been transformed into the overriding determinant of government policy and that this (recent) transformation was largely the work of one man, the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill, successively Master of the Rolls (1992-96), Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales (1996-2000) and Senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (2000-08). Starkey has never shied away from close-quarter combat and his charge sheet against Bingham is detailed and meticulous, if somewhat dyspeptic. Whether or not you endorse Starkey’s thesis, he is al ways engaging and well argued. At present, the UK’s approach to the law seems to raise more questions than it can provide answers.

5. “The art of the peace deal”: in The Financial Times, historian Professor Margaret MacMillan examines the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which gave birth to the Treaty of Versailles, and draws lessons on how to bring conflicts to a sustainable and lasting peace. The implications for a proposed agreement to end the war in Ukraine obvious. As she rightly points out, the circumstances under which a war ends can have profound implications for decades to come. It is a useful reminder of just how significant the “vibe” of a peace conference can be and how important it is to get it right.

“I do not think every home will have its own projecting machine, although the wealthier people will possess them, no doubt.” (Thomas Edison)

1. “Loch Ness: They Created A Monster”: for reasons I cannot explain, I’ve always had a vague interest—what would be an obsession if I had the time and energy—in cryptids, animals rumoured to live in the wild but the existence of which is unproven and often doubted. The Loch Ness Monster must be perhaps the famous cryptid of all, and this BBC documentary tracing the legend of the monster and those who seek it was fascinating. Logic, common sense and Occam’s Razor all tell you there is no Loch Ness Monster, any possible explanation being incredibly complex and unlikely, but the poster on Agent Mulder’s office wall spoke for millions: “I want to believe”. There are some surprises, too, in the lengths to which people are driven by their obsessions. A riveting socio-cultural study.

2. “Parkinson: The Interviews—Richard Burton”: BBC4 often delves into its archive of interviews by Michael Parkinson to fill the schedules, and why not? His eponymous show ran on the BBC from 1971 to 1982 and 1998 to 2004, turning out 428 episodes featuring the biggest stars of the day. A good listener, he was an unshowy inquisitor and usually got the best of out his guests (pace Meg Ryan), and this November 1974 encounter with Richard Burton is compelling. The Welsh star was at a low point, in the gap between his two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, and had not long before spent six weeks in a clinic when his alcoholism had seen him drinking three bottles of vodka a day. Burton was not quite 50 but already in poor health, and he spoke candidly to Parkinson about his relationship with alcohol, among other subjects. For all that, his astonishing charisma and presence radiates from the screen and his place as one of the most hypnotic actors of his generation is obvious. He still had some fine films ahead of him, like Equus, The Medusa Touch and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he would be dead within a decade. There was no-one quite like him.

3. “Henry VIII—The Jekyll and Hyde King”: Dr David Starkey delivers a talk addressing the character of Henry VIII and his apparent transformation in later life, rubbish, in typically bravura fashion, the current theory that the King suffered a severe blow to the head in a jousting accident which altered his personality. The lecture was given in October 2023 in St Mary’s Church, Godmanchester, in Cambridgeshire, and is sharp, witty, born of deep learning and judgement but takes absolutely no prisoners. It caused me to wonder whether we sometimes ignore the influence of genes on great figures in history, especially if they are somehow separated by significant events or a change of era; for example, I knew, intellectually, that Henry VIII’s maternal grandfather was Edward IV who died in 1483, two years before the Tudor succession and eight years before Henry was born, but I would not spontaneously have made such a close connection between the two. Yet the heritability of character traits is obvious. Proof that even now we sometimes don’t know the Tudors as well as we think.

4. “Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo”: The Rest Is History produced a four-part series on the Congo Free State, that huge swathe of central Africa which was from 1885 to 1908 the personal possession of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, and site of some of the worst and most brutal excesses of European colonialism. In this fourth and last episode, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook examine Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, which drew on the author’s experiences as a merchant seaman in the Congo, and which was the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1979 film Apolcalypse Now. It is a fascinating and dark story, a testament to Conrad’s creative genius—he was writing in his third language, after Polish and French—but also a monument to the darkest parts of the human psyche. The horror, the horror.

No more memories, no more silent tears…

… as Christine in The Phantom of the Opera sings, no more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.

I mean, it’s not for long, really.