Sunday round-up 29 December 2024

Birthday wishes to Marianne Faithfull, Ted Danson, Jennifer Ehle and Jude Law on this, the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury and the anniversary of Harold Macmillan's death

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain: words most famously sung by Frank Sinatra but written, in fact, by Canadian-born Paul Anka (to a French melody, Comme d’habitude, by Jacques Revaux). The final curtain of 2024, I hasten to add, rather than any more drastic veil, and I am choosing to hope than 2025 will be better. In any event, this is the last round-up of the year.

Celebrating another year on earth amid the detritus of the festive period, in this strange, trackless and sometimes listless space between Christmas and New Year, are Academy Award-winning actor, producer and in-with-both-feet right-winger Jon Voight (86), singer, actress and scion of Austro-Hungarian nobility Marianne Faithfull (78), actor, producer and 1980s stalwart Ted Danson (77), former First Minister of Northern Ireland and Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party Peter Robinson (76), journalist and editor Alan Rusbridger (71), actress Patricia Clarkson (65), journalist and Catalan separatist Carles Puigdemont (62), Prime Minister of Sweden Ulf Kristersson (61), writer, director and producer Lilly Wachowski (57), actress (and long-standing personal favourite) Jennifer Ehle (55), actor and long-time heartthrob Jude Law (52), actress, writer and producer Alison Brie (52) and singer-songwriter and nepo baby Alexa Ray Joel (39).

Our birthday boys and girls of times past include French courtier and official royal mistress Madame de Pompadour (1721), Glaswegian chemist and inventor of waterproof fabric Charles Macintosh (1766), pioneer of vulcanised rubber and godfather of the pneumatic tyre Charles Goodyear (1800), four-time Prime Minister and “Grand Old Man” of British politics William Gladstone (1809), cellist and conductor Pablo Casals (1876), advocate of air power and major deity of the United States Air Force Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell (1879), scientist, writer and broadcaster Magnus Pyke (1908), physicist and atomic spy Klaus Fuchs (1911), actor, singer and inexplicable fixture of light entertainment Bernard Cribbins (1928), economist, writer and journalist Sir Samuel Brittan (1933), actress and producer Mary Tyler Moore (1936), singer-songwriter, bassist and founding member of The Band Rick Danko (1943) and drummer, songwriter and producer Cozy Powell (1947).

A turbulent priest or a low-born cleric?

On this day in 1170 one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the English church occurred in Canterbury cathedral. Towards sunset, four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton, arrived from Saltwood Castle, about 16 miles away. They had come from Henry II’s court at Bures on Normandy and their intention was to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and instruct him to go to Winchester to face the King’s justice.

Henry and Becket, once very close friends, had fallen out catastrophically shortly after the latter had been appointed archbishop eight years before over the power of the crown and the jurisdiction of the church. Becket had gone into exile at the end of 1164 after being convicted of contempt of royal authority and malfeasance in office as Chancellor of England from 1155 to 1162, but earlier in 1170, the King had, in frustrated exhaustion, offered a compromise by which Becket could return to England. It seemed that the rift had at least been healed; but in June, the Archbishop of York, Roger de Pont L’Évêque, assisted by Bishop Gilbert Foliot of London and Josceline de Bohon, Bishop of Salisbury, had crowned Henry II’s son, the 15-year-old Henry “the Young King”, to formalise his status as heir apparent. (This was a common practice in Capetian France but not in England.)

The coronation of the Young King by the Archbishop of York directly breached the privilege of authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury to officiate at coronations, and when the news reached Becket, he was outraged and excommunicated all three prelates. This in turn found its way to Henry in Normandy, and his rage was greater still. Exactly what he said to his courtiers is not certain: traditionally he is reported to have exclaimed “Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?” The version recorded by Becket’s chaplain and biographer, Edward Grim, is less epigrammatic.

What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?

In any event, at least the four knights who arrived at the Cathedral Church of Christ, Canterbury, late in the afternoon of 29 December 1170 had taken the meaning to heart.

The knights placed their weapons under a tree outside the cathedral and covered their armour with their cloaks before entering to demand the Archbishop’s submission. Becket refused absolutely to obey them, and made towards the main hall for vespers, the office sung at dusk. The knights left to collect their weapons and returned, whereupon the monks of Canterbury attempted to close and bolt the doors against them, but the Archbishop would have none of it. “It is not right to make a fortress out of the house of prayer!”

The four armed men then burst in, shouting “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the King and country?” He was by a door to the cloister, at the foot of the steps leading up to the choir where the monks were now singing vespers, and it is almost as if he knew this was his starring moment in history. “I am no traitor and I am ready to die”, he announced, and as one of the knights grabbed him and pulled him towards the door, Becket held fast to a pillar, and bowed his head in prayer.

The first sword blow took off the top of Becket’s skull, but, along with a second wound to the head did not quite fell him. A third stroke of a sword caused him to drop to his hands and knees, and he was heard to say “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church, I am ready to embrace death”. A fourth blow widened Becket’s head wound and Grim records that “the blood turned white from the brain yet no less did the brain turn red from the blood; it purpled the appearance of the church”. Murder in the cathedral.

Becket had not been a notably holy man in life, but the monks who dressed his body for burial found a hair shirt, crawling with vermin, under his vestments, the sign of a penitent. He was soon venerated as a martyr, and less than three years after his death he was canonised by Pope Alexander III, an extraordinarily short period. His shrine at Canterbury became one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in Europe until Henry VIII ordered its destruction in 1538 as part of the suppression of the Benedictine cathedral priory.

All changed, changed utterly

Today in 1860, at the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company in Blackwall, a new armoured frigate, HMS Warrior, was launched. It was the coldest winter for half a century and she froze to the slipway, requiring hydraulic rams, additional tugboats and dockworkers running from side to side on her deck to rock the ship free, but once she was was afloat, naval warfare had changed forever.

HMS Warrior was iron-hulled and armour-plated, with 40 guns of varying sizes, and was a response to the launch a year before of the French warship Gloire, an ironclad with a wooden hull able to fire explosive shells. The Gloire’s firepower made traditional wooden ships of the line far more vulnerable than they had previously been, and the Royal Navy had no vessels to match her or her sister ships, Invincible and Normandie. But HMS Warrior took the technological race a step further: her hull was made of iron, she bore wrought-iron armour plating and was steam-powered and driven by a screw propeller. Although most of these elements were already in use, their combination made the ship faster, better armoured and harder to hit than any other warship and the most powerful naval vessel in service.

The Admiralty understood the seismic change which HMS Warrior represented, and suspended the construction of all wooden warships, instead ordering another 11 ironclads over the subsequent few years. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, HMS Warrior’s gunnery lieutenant in 1863-64, wrote later: “It certainly was not appreciated that this, our first armourclad ship of war, would cause a fundamental change in what had been in vogue for something like a thousand years.”

HMS Warrior was commissioned in August 1861 and underwent sea trials before being assigned to the Channel Squadron. But her construction had sparked a design race so fierce that within a decade she was verging on the obsolete, and the launch of HMS Devastation in July 1871 moved the goalposts again: she was mastless, unlike HMS Warrior, which allowed her main armament to be mounted in turrets rather than inside the hull. In May 1883, she was decommissioned, reclassified as a “screw battle ship, third class, armoured” in 1887 and as an armoured cruiser in 1892, before eventually being struck off the list in 1900. But she survives as a museum ship in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, a testament to the heyday of British naval supremacy and the fact that technological change and design ingenuity can change warfare in a single leap.

È finita la commedia

Thirty-eight years ago, in 1986, the 1st Earl of Stockton died at the age of 92. His last words, reported by his grandson and heir Alexander, were “I think I’ll go to sleep now”. As Harold Macmillan, he had served nearly seven years as Prime Minister, from January 1957 to October 1963, and had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, but that seemed unimaginably distant by the time of his death. A man who had served in the First World War, been elected to the House of Commons in 1924 and saved the Conservative Party after the disaster of Suez died months after Top Gun was released, Big Bang deregulated the London Stock Exchange and Alex Ferguson was appointed manager of Manchester United.

Here is not the place for a study of Supermac’s long and varied political career; Alistair Horne’s official biography remains excellent and comprehensive, D.R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan is astute and well-judged and Simon Ball’s The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made brilliantly situates Macmillan in his generation and social milieu. He resigned as Prime Minister in October 1963 nearing his 70th birthday, using medical problems as a reason to leave, and stepped down from the House of Commons at the following year’s general election, but he had more than 20 years of life ahead of him.

Like any retiring Prime Minister, Macmillan could have gone to the House of Lords but at that point refused a peerage. From 1964 to 1974, he was Chairman of Macmillan Publishers, the family firm, and wrote six volumes of autobiography, the most voluminous prime ministerial memoirs in British history. Still, partly fuelled by mischief, ambition remained alive within him: in 1976, in a television interview with Robin Day, he advocated a government of national unity to deal with the UK’s economic crisis, and, when asked who might lead such a ministry, remarked “You know, Mr Gladstone formed his last Government when he was eighty-three. I’m only eighty-two. You mustn’t put temptation in my way.” He entertained the idea seriously enough to discuss it with his predecessor the Earl of Avon, formerly Sir Anthony Eden.

Macmillan greeted the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in May 1979 with amused curiosity. They had little enough in common politically: Macmillan was the wettest of wets, a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian whose 1938 book The Middle Way was in many respects almost socialist. But he saw the opportunity for occasional mischievous and witty interventions. He told his biographer Nigel Fisher, Conservative MP for Surbiton:

Ted [Heath] was a very good number two… *pause*… not a leader… *pause*. Now, you have a real leader… *long pause* Whether she’s leading you in the right direction…

Thatcher, for all her impatience with the old Conservative Party establishment, perhaps remembered that she had first been elected to Parliament in Macmillan’s great general election victory of 1959, and it had been Supermac who, two years later, had appointed her to her first ministerial post as Parliamentary Secretary for Pensions. Consequently she sought and often followed his advice, creating a small War Cabinet to manage the Falklands conflict in 1982 and excluding Treasury ministers from it. In her memoirs she acknowledged:

I never regretted following Harold Macmillan’s advice. We were never tempted to compromise the security of our forces for financial reasons. Everything we did was governed by military necessity.

In 1983, Thatcher had created the first new non-royal hereditary peerages for nearly 20 years, ennobling her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, and the outgoing Speaker of the House of Commons, George Thomas, as viscounts (Whitelaw had no sons to inherit the title and Thomas was unmarried). Macmillan let it be known that he would accept the earldom which had traditionally been bestowed on former Prime Ministers, and in February 1984 he became the 1st Earl of Stockton.

He made his maiden speech in the House of Lords on 13 November 1984, speaking without notes because his eyesight was by then very poor. It was the height of the Miners’ Strike, and, while Macmillan cautiously endorsed some of Thatcher’s economic policy, it was obvious that the bitterness of the dispute grieved him deeply.

Although at my age I cannot interfere or do anything about it, it breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country today. A terrible strike is being carried on by the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army. They never gave in. The strike is pointless and endless. We cannot afford action of this kind.

Macmillan had always been consciously theatrical. Enoch Powell had dubbed him, with distaste, “the old actor-manager”, and recalled his appeal to Conservative backbenchers in 1956, allowing him to succeed to the premiership ahead of Rab Butler, as “one of the most horrible things that I remember in politics… the sheer devilry of it verged upon the disgusting”. But Macmillan was 90 now, in fact as well as in disposition and self-image a man long out of time, and his gentle, humorous chiding of the monetarist extremists of the Thatcher government was dazzling.

He spoke again on social and economic policy in January 1985, for fully half an hour, and as a sheer parliamentary spectacle it is compelling. He referred to “one of my oldest and dearest friends, Lord Keynes”, who had by then been dead for nearly 40 years, and with mock-astonishment hailed the achievement of monetarist economists:

They have invented the one new law that there is no difference between capital and income. Under this law, apparently, you can spend all your capital on current account. In the old days we had above and below the line… Of course, it may apply to governments but I am not sufficiently well up to know. It certainly applies to individuals. Some of the nicest fellows I have known in my life have experienced this confusion between capital and income, but they usually ended up in rather dreary lodging houses.

Was Macmillan’s the brightest of prime ministerial Indian summers? Perhaps A.J. Balfour, representing the British Empire at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, might disagree, and Sir Tony Blair, presiding over the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, does not feel he is played out yet. But the Earl of Stockton was a stubborn if playful reminder of a world which had been left behind.

The dignity of the saints is so great because they are not of this world, but of the household of God

Today is a lean day indeed for commemoration. It is of course the feast of St Thomas Becket (see above); it is also the feast of St Trophimus of Arles (3rd century AD), who became the first Bishop of Arles and is invoked against gout and drought; and of St Ebrulf (AD 516 -AD 596), a Frankish hermit who served at the Merovingian court before taking monastic vows, founding 15 religious houses and presiding over the community at Ouche in Normandy as abbot.

It is Constitution Day in the Republic of Ireland, marking the day in 1937 in which the Constitution came into effect and the Irish Free State became Ireland. In Mongolia, readers (you never know!) are celebrating Independence Day, marking the country’s separation from Qing China in 1911 and the accession of the Bogdo Lama, born Agvaan Luvsan Choijinnyam Danzan Vanchüg and, as the 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the third most senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism, as ruler of the Bogd Khanate.

Factoids

1. The last Tsarina of Russia, Alexandra, born a princess of Hesse and by Rhine, was a foolish and erratic woman who probably made her husband’s troubles as Tsar worse, but it does not lessen the human tragedy of 17 July 1918, when the imperial family was murdered in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. The Tsarina watched Tsar Nicholas and two manservants executed before a local commissar, Pyotr Ermakov, killed her with a single gunshot to the head. The last entry in the Tsarina’s diary, from the previous evening, read “Played bezique with Nicholas”.

2. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a philosopher and politician from Punjab, outlined his two-state vision for an independent India today in 1930, laying the groundwork for the creation of Pakistan in 1947. The name “Pakistan”, however, was not coined until 1933: Choudry Rahmat Ali explained in a pamphlet entitled Now or Never, “It is composed of letters taken from the names of all our homelands, Indian and Asian, Panjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan”.

3. In 1718, James Puckle, a lawyer, writer and inventor from Norwich, patented a “Defence Gun”, more commonly known after him as the “Puckle Gun”, which was an early and rudimentary form of machine gun. It was a single-barreled flintlock weapon fitted with a multi-shot revolving cylinder, mounted on a tripod, and was designed for use on board ships to repel boarders. Puckle demonstrated two versions: the first, which fired conventional ammunition, was for use against Christian enemies; the second, intended for use against Muslim Turks, fired square bullets which were believed to inflict more painful wounds and would therefore—so his logic ran—“convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilization”. The weapon was not a success.

4. Pluto, for a while the solar system’s ninth planet before it was downgraded to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, takes its name, like the other planets (except Earth) from Roman mythology: Pluto was the god of the Underworld, the counterpart of the Greek god Hades. When the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, announced the discovery of the new planet, it was inundated with more than a thousand suggested names, of which the most popular were Minerva (goddess of wisdom, law, justice and victory, the counterpart of Athene), Cronus (youngest of the Titans and father of Zeus) and Pluto. The observatory staff preferred Minerva but it was already in use for an asteroid, while Cronus was ruled out because it was promoted by a controversial and quarrelsome astronomer, Thomas Jefferson Jackson See. Pluto had been suggested by 150 correspondents, the first of which was an 11-year-old schoolgirl from Oxford, Venetia Burney, whose grandfather, Falconer Madan, was Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford. Madan passed on the suggestion to his fellow Oxford academic Professor Herbert Hall Turner, Director of the Radcliffe Observatory, who then cabled it to his colleagues at the Lowell Observatory.

5. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Mark Antony imagines inciting the populace of Rome to take violent revenge on Caesar’s assassins, and famously says “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war”. “Havoc” was a mediaeval battlefield command which indicated that soldiers were released from their formation and could loot freely, as a result of which it was only ever used when victory was beyond question. It comes from the 14th century Anglo-French phrase crier havok, in turn derived from the Old French havot, or “pillage”. The possible sources for havot are haver, “to seize”, the Germanic-derived hef or “hook” or the Latin habere, “to have”. The usage of “havoc” to mean devastation or disorder in general appears relatively early, in the late 15th century.

6. This week President-elect Donald Trump, apparently feeling acquisitive, stated on his social media platform Truth Social that “For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity”. He had previously proposed that the United States should buy Greenland in 2018-19, and the idea had been mooted by his predecessors in 1867, 1910 and 1946. Denmark, while ruled Greenland directly until 1979 and retains sovereignty over it as an autonomous territory, has indicated it is not for sale. Greenland’s Nordic society and institutions are considerably older than the United States: the first cathedral in Greenland, the Cathedral of St Nicholas in Garðar, was begun in 1126 by the first Bishop of Garðar, Arnaldur, who was ordained by Asser Thorkilsen, Archbishop of Lund, in 1124. The first European settlements had been established in AD 986 by Icelandic explorers. In 1271 Greenland submitted to the Kingdom of Norway, which then entered a personal union with the Kingdom of Denmark in 1380 under Olaf II (Olav IV of Norway). By the time the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in what is now Massachusetts in 1620, then, Greenland had been settled for 634 years.

7. On 4 June 1923, a young Irish horse trainer called Frank Hayes, riding Sweet Kiss, won a steeplechase at Belmont Park, near Elmont, New York. Hayes was not a professional jockey and Sweet Kiss had been a 20-1 outsider; it was the rider’s first victory. It would also be his last. He suffered a fatal heart attack during the latter part of the race and was already dead when he crossed the finishing line.

8. It is estimated that chickens were first domesticated in South Asia in around 6,000 BC, before spreading to China and India. But some scientists believe they were not kept for food for millennia, as their size made their nutritional value modest; they may initially have been kept largely for fighting.

9. Cockfighting is now banned in many countries. It was prohibited in England and Wales by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, and in Scotland in 1895. It is also illegal in all 50 of the United States, but the last was Louisiana, where the State Legislature approved a ban in June 2007 which came into force in 2008.

10. The sport remains both legal and enormously popular in Cuba. However, since the revolution in 1959, it has been illegal to bet on the outcome of cockfights.

“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable.” (John Berger)

1. “From Roger Moore with Love”: the BBC, God bless it, hit the jackpot on Christmas Day with an affectionate, revealing and well-crafted portrait of the late Sir Roger Moore, including rare home movie footage and readings from the great man (in character) by Steve Coogan. There was a reassuring unanimity from interviewees that Moore was a genuinely kind, warm, funny human being, who put an enormous amount of effort into making his life seem effortless. And it was a good reminder that success did not come immediately to him: he was nearly 45 years old when he was cast as James Bond—nearly three years older than Sean Connery, whom he replaced—and had been considered for the role in Dr. No in 1962 and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969. There is every sign that he had a whale of a time making film and television, and that others did so with him because of that. No-one ever raised an eyebrow with more effect.

2. “Maggie Smith at the BBC”: given free rein in the BBC archives it would be hard to make this anything less than absorbing and brilliant, but the Celia Imrie-narrated collection is a good reminder, for anyone who needed it, of how good Dame Maggie Smith was. Yesterday would have been her 90th birthday, of which she fell just three months short, dying on 27 September. What were her highlights? It seems both impossible and invidious to choose; snippets from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Travels with my Aunt, Death on the Nile and Downton Abbey are all delightful but the interviews with Michael Parkinson, Michael Aspel and others are the real joy, with Smith frank, warm and self-deprecating.

3. “Bullitt”: ITV found space in the schedule for Peter Yates’s iconic 1968 police thriller, with Steve McQueen as the eponymous Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, Robert Vaughn as San Francisco mover-and-shaker Walter Chalmers and Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt’s girlfriend Cathy. It is a fine, taut story on its own merits but several elements lift it soaringly above the mainstream. Vaughn makes the most of a relatively straightforward role as a sharp, potent but slippery operator with political ambitions, McQueen, sporting a black roll neck as no-one else could, oozes charisma, Lalo Schifrin’s edgy jazz-influenced soundtrack perfectly fits the unsettling air and the car chase, with McQueen at the wheel of a Highland Green Ford Mustang GT Fastback, is legendary. Everything about Bullitt is stylish, tight and spare: a genuinely brilliant film.

4. “Triggernometry: Stephen Fry”: sometimes I find Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster a little too relentless and contrarian and I can’t claim to be a religious attender to their Triggernometry podcast but it can be fascinating and thought-provoking. Their interview with Stephen Fry, about my admiration for whom I wrote early in the life of this blog, is an absorbing hour of viewing or listening. Fry has a reputation as the luvviest of lefties, which he does not disavow, but he is also profoundly liberal, and it is perhaps a reflection of shifting political culture to see how he finds himself with different allies and different opponents, especially on matters like freedom of speech.

5. “Yes, Minister: Party Games”: BBC4 rolled out the final episode of Yes, Minister, which is set at Christmas, in which first Sir Humphrey Appleby gets the nod to succeed his mentor Sir Arnold Robinson as Secretary to the Cabinet and then, against expectations and, some think, logic, Jim Hacker, the inoffensive Minister of Administrative Affairs, weaves round more eminent colleagues to snatch the keys to 10 Downing Street. I must have seen this a dozen times, and it is now 40 years old, yet it remains fresh and sparkling, the sharply witty script delivered by actors at the top of their comedic game. Worryingly, perhaps, it still feels relevant.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” (André Gide)

1. “Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading”: in The Financial Times, critic and author Mia Levitin addresses the decline in how much and how often adults are reading. I am cautious about the extent to which we lay the malaises of the world at the door of social media and think we should take a more balanced view of it and the opportunities it affords, but her argument is persuasive that it is “designed to hijack our attention with stimulation and validation” and makes sustained reading more challenging. On the other hand, I was cheered and reassured by her prescription: she suggests a number of ways we can reacquaint ourselves with the reading habit, something I am perennially determined to do—anyone who says confidently that they read enough should not be trusted—and there is a more basic reassurance in the fact that we at least feel we should read more. Now let’s do so!

2. “The eternal Bossman”: some of the best journalism takes a subject you’d never considered before and not only makes it engaging but uses it as a window on to a much larger subject. This brilliant Bagehot column by Duncan Robinson in The Economist looks at what I call for convenience “corner shops”, irrespective of location, and traces their survival through changing economic circumstances and shopping habits. Robinson shows that these outlets have continually adapted to customer needs, for example becoming, in his delightful phrase, “gonzo post offices” which offer parcel delivery and collection. A fascinating insight into the economy through an unexpected lens. (“Bossman”, by the way, is a common London appelation for the owner of a corner shop or other small business, though I’m not sure I will start using it for fear of offence.)

3. “A ‘Modern-Day Casablanca’”: in the effortlessly chic Airmail, Josh Karp pays tribute to that icon of 1980s American television drama, Miami Vice. It had its genesis in the writer Anthony Yerkovich reading in The Wall Street Journal that one-fifth of all unreported income in the United States came through the city of Miami, and begat a series “that brought feature-film ambition to the small screen”. Michael Mann, who called it “vivacious, audacious, irreverent”, agreed to produce the show if he could have full (and absolutely painstaking) creative control, and was a transformational element: as Karp says, “Mann didn’t direct a single episode yet became an auteur in the world of television drama”. The aesthetic of Miami Vice can be traced through his later Manhunter (1986), for me one of the greatest films about which I wrote for CulturAll a couple of years ago, Heat (1995) and Collateral (2004). A joyous celebration of majestic television.

4. “Star Trek’s Cold War”: Tom Nichols in The Atlantic teases out the real-world parallels of Star Trek in its initial days. It is well established that a lot of American television from the 1950s onwards was heavily influenced by, and tried to reflect, the Cold War, and Nichols focuses on the first three seasons of Star Trek, from 1966 to 1969, to show how its creator, Gene Roddenberry, and the various writers were in fact engaging in a conversation about geopolitics. The United Federation of Planets was an avatar of NATO and the Klingon Empire was a version of the Soviet Union, allowing the show to imagine their interactions in all kinds of scenarios. It can seem heavy-handed and unsubtle to modern audiences, but in the 1960s the threat of nuclear war was a feature of life and an ever-relevant topic. In the end, Nichols concludes, Star Trek carried a message of optimism: “somehow, we were all going to get through the 20th century and eventually live under the wise aegis of the Federation”.

5. “No more Mr Nice Guy. The centre’s too soft”: I despise the comfortable, condescending notion of “sensible”, “moderate” centrist politics, but am happy to welcome Trevor Phillips to the realisation that it’s bust. In The Times, he faces up to some key truths of public policy which make a nonsense of the idea of a centre: “tax revenues can help the young build their assets or protect those of the elderly; they can rarely do both at the same time”, “the cabinet can make infrastructure its central growth objective but it cannot then keep out the immigrants who would pour the concrete” and “ministers still prevaricate over whether biological women should be protected from male invasion”. This is why I wrote in July, as the new prime minister promised to be “unburdened by dogma”, that doctrine, ideology, ideas matter and cannot be cast aside in favour of nebulous managerialism. Phillips correctly sees that there is not always a compromise to be made, an amiable common ground on which everyone can converge. People naturally, fundamentally and healthily disagree on basic principles like the size and role of the state and the country’s place in the world. This is not a bad thing, and we have democracy to mediate the disagreement.

The world is round…

… as Rebecca West wrote, and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning. That seems like an appropriate way to end the last round-up of 2024. See you next year.