Sunday round-up 9 February 2025

Cake and champagne for Carole King, Joe Pesci and Tom Hiddleston, ructions in American history and a parade of saints including Apollonia, Teilo and Bracchio

For various reasons, I have not watched much television this week, so I am (again) experimenting by replacing the recommendations of things to watch with recommendations of music to listen to. You see? You can never be complacent. Change is always around the corner.

Today you would have a diverse crowd for a communal birthday party including actress and director Dame Janet Suzman (86), novelist and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee (85), singer-songwriter Carole King (83), actor and stereotypical wise guy Joe Pesci (82), economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (82), novelist and poet Alice Walker (81), actress and activist Mia Farrow (80), golfer Bernard Gallacher (76), actor Ciarán Hinds (72), Sham 69 founder and frontman Jimmy Pursey (70), footballer, manager and intense ginger Gordon Strachan (68), golfer Sandy Lyle (67), singer-songwriter Holly Johnson (65), screenwriter, producer, author and journalist David Simon (65), alliterative country music star Travis Tritt (62), model and actress Amber Valetta (51), actor, Old Etonian and classicist Tom Hiddleston (44) and actress Rose Leslie (38). The catering will be fun.

I’d-love-to-but-I’m-completely-dead apologies have been received from Pope Honorius II (1060), founder of Paris’s oldest extant café Procopio Cutò (1651), Britain’s first field marshal the Earl of Orkney (1666), philosopher and Founding Father Thomas Paine (1737), America’s shortest-serving President (one month) William Henry Harrison (1773), pioneering stenographer Franz Xaver Gabelsberger (1789), engineer and “King of Designers” Wilhelm Maybach (1846), The Prisoner of Zenda author Sir Anthony Hope (1863), renowned stage actress Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865), poetess Amy Lowell (1874), composer Alban Berg (1885), Hollywood star and noted moustache-wearer Ronald Colman (1891), actress, singer and dancer Carmen Miranda (1909), United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1909), poet, playwright and drink-enjoyer Brendan Behan (1923), two-time Taoiseach of Ireland Garret FitzGerald (1926) and actor and singer Clive Swift (1936). Terrible flakes anyway.

Them’s fightin’ words

Today in 1775, the House of Lords and House of Commons presented an Address to the King, George III, which declared that the Province of Massachusetts Bay was in rebellion against the crown. Parliament had concluded that:

A part of Your Majesty’s subjects in the province of Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature, that a rebellion at this time actually exists within the said province, and we see, with the utmost concern, that they have been countenanced and encouraged by unlawful combinations and engagements, entered into by Your Majesty’s other subjects in several of the other colonies, to the injury and oppression of many of their fellow subjects… we ever have been, and always shall be, ready to pay attention and regard to any real grievances of any of Your Majesty’s subjects, laid before us in a dutiful and constitutional manner. [But] we humbly beseech Your Majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature; and we assure Your Majesty that it is our fixed resolution, at the hazard of our lives and properties, to stand by Your Majesty against all rebellious attempts.

There had been mounting strife and civil disobedience over trade and taxation, and in 1774 Parliament passed a series of five acts: the Boston Port Act 1774, the Massachusetts Government Act 1774, the Administration of Justice Act 1774, the Quartering Act 1774 and the Quebec Act 1774. Referred to in Britain as the “Coercive Acts”, they were dubbed the “Intolerable Acts” by the colonists. They effectively closed the port of Boston until the losses of the Boston Tea Party had been reimbursed, removed Massachusetts’s powers of self-government, allowed the Governor to order officials to be tried in Britain or elsewhere in the Empire rather than in Massachusetts, expanded the powers of the government to quarter soldiers in private houses and extended the Province of Quebec, where there was freedom to practise Roman Catholicism, into what is now the Mid-West United States.

The government of Prime Minister Lord North hoped that the Coercive Acts would isolate radicals among the colonists and browbeat moderates into submission and obedience. In fact, their harsh provisions stoked tensions and made it almost impossible even for moderates to defend the interests of the Crown and the British Parliament. In September and October 1774, delegates from the 13 colonies met in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress to discuss collective action in response to the Coercive Acts. It issued a Declaration and Resolves on 14 October, and sent a petition to King George III which laid out the colonies’ grievances but also reaffirmed their loyalty to the Crown. It also adopted the Continental Association, calling for a boycott of British merchants.

The Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, dissolved the provincial legislature, the Great and General Court, which was meeting in Salem. Its members met in defiance of his orders as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress on 7 October under the presidency of John Hancock and relocated to Concord, then assuming the power to govern the province, collect taxes and raise a militia. It met again in Cambridge on 1 February. The Address to His Majesty that Massachusetts was in rebellion was an accurate summary of the state of affairs, but made war inevitable on some terms. On 14 April 1775, Gage received orders from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Earl of Dartmouth, to disarm the rebels and imprison their ringleaders.

Five days later, a force of 700 British soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith moved to capture and destroy arms and ammunition believed to be stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Smith’s advance force of six companies of light infantry under Major John Pitcairn entered Lexington at sunrise and encountered around 80 militiamen commanded by Captain John Parker. He had no desire to provoke a confrontation and lined up his men on Lexington Common, expecting the British forces to pass through; he told them “Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

What happened next is uncertain. A British officer, either Pitcairn or Lieutenant William Sutherland, advanced and told the militia to disperse, which order Parker repeated. But Parker could not easily be heard, as his voice had been weakened by tuberculosis, meaning that the militiamen did not lay down their arms or immediately disperse. Although Pitcairn and Parker had both told their troops to hold their fire, in the confusion, almost inevitably a shot was fired from an unknown source, perhaps followed quickly by others; the accounts of the morning differ. The result was no more than a skirmish which history records rather grandiosely as the Battle of Lexington: one British soldier was wounded in the thigh and eight militiamen were killed. There was a larger confrontation at Concord itself, and the British forces were driven back to Boston. The American War of Independence had begun.

Don’t call me Little Jeff

On this day in 1861, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, which had been meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, for five days, chose former Secretary of War and United States Senator for Mississippi Jefferson Davis as provisional President of the Confederate States and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as Vice-President. The previous day it had agreed the Provisional Constitution.

The Provisional Congress comprised representatives of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, which had by that stage all seceded from the United States. Its President was Howell Cobb of Georgia, who had previously been Speaker of the US House of Representatives (1849-51), Governor of Georgia (1851-53) and Secretary of the Treasury (1857-60). The southern states had been prompted to secede by the election as President of the United States in November 1860 of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the new Republican Party, whom they believed to be a threat to the institution of slavery which underpinned the economy and society of the South. The new president was due to be inaugurated on 4 March.

Davis was 52 years old, born, like Lincoln, in Kentucky, but he had grown up in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, the youngest of 10 children of a slave-owning cotton planter, Samuel Davis. He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, and was commissioned into the 1st Infantry Regiment, then transferred to the US Regiment of Dragoons (later the 1st Cavalry Regiment). Court-martialled for insubordination but acquitted, he resigned from the US Army in 1835 and returned to Mississippi to run a cotton plantation. In the 1840s he began to be active in the Democratic Party and was elected to the House of Representatives for Mississippi in 1845, then was appointed to the state’s vacant Senate seat in 1847. He left the Senate in 1851 to run unsuccessfully for Governor of Mississippi but was named Secretary of War by President Franklin Pierce in March 1853. After Pierce’s presidency he returned to the Senate and served until his state seceded from the Union in January 1861, which he described as “the saddest day of my life”. His emotional resignation speech made clear his personal disappointment but also his certainty that his loyalty lay with Mississippi before the Union.

Jefferson Davis would be the only President of the Confederate States. He was inaugurated on 18 February 1861 then elected for a six-year term—one of the few differences between the Constitution of the Confederacy and the United States Constitution—on 6 November 1861, taking office formally on 22 February 1862. He served as President and Commander-in-Chief throughout the Civil War, eventually dissolving the government on 5 May 1865. He was imprisoned for two years, and the House of Representatives passed a resolution to try him for treason, but he was released on bail amid fears that a jury in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, might acquit. The case against him was abandoned in 1869, and he spent his old age burnishing his reputation. He wrote a two-volume account entitled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) and a memoir, A Short History of the Confederate States of America, completed shortly before his death. In November 1889 he became ill with acute bronchitis complicated by malaria, and died at 12.45 pm on 6 December, aged 81.

They love you, yeah yeah yeah

This is a double anniversary for the Beatles. Today in 1961, the band, then comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, performed for the first time as the Beatles in the Cavern Club on Mathew Street in Liverpool. The venue was still primarily a jazz club but had begun to allow rock and roll performances like this one at lunchtime. They had just returned from a residency in Hamburg.

Only three years later, on this day in 1964, the Beatles made their American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. The programme’s talent booker, Jack Babb, had seen the band twice in concert in the UK, and Sullivan himself had witnessed a crowd of 1,500 at Heathrow Airport waiting to see the Fab Four return from a tour of Sweden on October 1963. They arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on 7 February 1964, greeted by 5,000 fans, and two days later an estimated 73 million Americans watched them on television. The band performed All My Loving, Till There Was You and She Loves You, then returned later in the show with I Saw Her Standing There and I Want to Hold Your Hand. The rest is pop history.

The assembly of all the saints

A banquet of feasts today. We commemorate St Apollonia (d. AD 249), a virgin martyr who had all her teeth pulled out before being burned to death and is consequently patroness of dentistry; St Sabinus of Canosa (AD 461-AD 566), an Apulian and friend of St Benedict who was Bishop of Canosa di Puglia from AD 514 to AD 566 and twice a papal envoy to Constantinople; St Teilo (AD 500-AD 560), a Welsh monk, cousin and friend of St David and Bishop of Llandaff from AD 546 to his death, when his body miraculously became three identical bodies; St Nebridius (d. AD 545), a Catalan scholar and Benedictine monk who was Bishop of Egara then Bishop of Barcelona and had three brothers who were also canonised, St Justus, St Elpidius and St Justinian; St Bracchio (d. AD 576), a Thuringian nobleman who founded a monastery at Pionsat in the Auvergne then became Abbot of Menat where he reestablished strict monastic discipline; St Ansbert of Rouen (d. AD 695), a Norman aristocrat who served at the Frankish court of Clotaire III before becoming a Benedictine monk and Abbot of Fontenelle, then Archbishop of Rouen; St Alto of Altomünster (d. AD 760), a Benedictine abbot, perhaps originally Scottish or Irish, who founded Altomünster Abbey in Bavaria on land granted by Pepin the Short, King of the Franks; and St Miguel Febres Cordero (1854-1910), the first Ecuadorian member of the Brothers of the Christian Schools who wrote and translated a number of religious and other textbooks.

For our Lebanese readers, it is St Maroun’s Day, a national holiday in honour of St Maron, founder of the Antiochene Syriac Maronite Church, a particular church with around 3.5 million adherents which is in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church and is headed by the Patriarch of Antioch and all the East, Bechara Boutros Cardinal Al-Ra’i.

Factoids

1. It was reported in The Times this week that Palmerston, the black and white bicolour cat who enjoyed the title of Chief Mouser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 2016 to 2020, has relocated to warmer climes. He is now a “feline relations consultant” to Andrew Murdoch, the new Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bermuda, who first encountered Palmerston when he (Murdoch) was Director of Ocean Policy at the FCO. Bermuda is one of (currently…) 14 British Overseas Territories but enjoys substantial autonomy: what may surprise you is that there has been a separate legislature in Bermuda since 1620, when the House of Assembly held its first session. It was unicameral until 1888, a Legislative Council being established to act as an upper house, and this was renamed as the Senate in 1980. The Parliament of Bermuda is therefore the oldest extant legislature in the Americas, and one of the oldest surviving parliaments in the world.

2. The House of Lords announced this week that Black Rod, Sarah Clarke CVO OBE, will step down later in the year and a new Lady or Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod will be appointed (if you want to apply, the notice is here). The office was created by letters patent in 1350 as an usher of the Order of the Garter, first carrying out duties in Parliament in 1522, and today he or she is responsible for administrative and ceremonial aspects of access to the House of Lords and maintaining order. Clarke was the first woman ever appointed to the role, and the first for centuries who was not a former senior officer in the armed forces. She is not the only holder of such a title: there are Ushers of the Black Rod in the Australian Senate, the Legislative Councils of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, the Senate of Canada, the Legislative Assemblies of Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Alberta, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the Parliament of the Cook Islands, the New Zealand Parliament and the National Council of Provinces of South Africa. There were previously Gentlemen Ushers of the Black Rod in the Irish House of Lords and the Senate of Northern Ireland.

3. As Black Rod began as an officer of the Order of the Garter, so the other orders of chivalry have ushers. The Order of the Thistle includes a Gentleman Usher of the Green Rod, the Order of the Bath a Gentleman Usher of the Scarlet Rod, the Order of St Michael and St George a Gentleman Usher of the Blue Rod and the Order of the British Empire a Gentleman Usher of the Purple Rod.

4. The Parliament of Scotland which was dissolved after the Acts of Union in 1707 was attended by an officer called the Gentleman Usher of the White Rod. The Walker Trust Act 1877 incorporated the office of “Heritable Usher of Scotland” in the trust, created to administer a bequest to the Scottish Episcopal Church; it had been purchased by William Walker of Aberdeen in 1805, passed to his son Sir Patrick Walker, and then formed part of the legacy left by his sisters, Barbara and Mary. The current Heritable Usher of the White Rod is the ex officio chair of the Walker Trustees, the Bishop of Edinburgh, Dr John Armes.

5. At the beginning of the week, Kemi Badenoch had an audience with the King at Buckingham Palace formally to mark her appointment as Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. It used to be a matter of course that the sovereign received new leaders of the Opposition shortly after they took up the role; in some cases (Tony Blair in 1994, Iain Duncan Smith in 2001, David Cameron in 2005, Jeremy Corbyn in 2015) the first meeting would be when the Leader of the Opposition swore the oath or affirmed as a member of the Privy Council if they were not already one. But after David Cameron was granted an audience in 2006, the late Queen discontinued the practice (he was, after all, her 19th leader of the Opposition). The King has revived the practice, having frequently met occupants of the role when he was Prince of Wales, and the indications from the Royal Household are that it will be a permanent revival. Good. It is a reminder that His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition have not only a valuable and legitimate but necessary role in our constitutional arrangements to hold the government to account. (Thanks to Dr Nigel Fletcher’s Substack for the details on this.)

6. Pit ponies were first recorded in British collieries in County Durham in 1750. Almost unimaginably, they spent most of their lives underground, stabled in the mines and fed on chopped maize and hay, often only coming to the surface for the pit’s annual holiday. They were reputed to develop particularly acute vision in the low light, and worked an eight-hour shift each day. This took its toll, with their average working lives estimated at three and a half years, compared to perhaps 20 years for animals on the surface. But they were in greater demand than ever after the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, which forbade women and girls of any age from working underground and mandated a minimum age of 10 for boys: ponies (a catch-all term for all horses employed in mines) replaced much of the human labour. At the peak of their use, in 1913, there were 70,000 pit ponies in service, but mechanical haulage gradually took over many of their tasks. Nevertheless, by the time of the miners’ strike in 1984, there were still 55 ponies employed by the National Coal Board, and when Ellington Colliery in Northumberland closed in 1994, four pit ponies were still working: Tony, Sparky, Carl and Pike. The last pony to work underground was probably Robbie, who retired from Pant y Gasseg Colliery near Pontypool in 1999. Tony, one of the Ellington ponies, was the last survivor, dying in July 2011.

7. It is a cliché of history that one contributory factor to the Protestant Reformation was the poor standard of Catholic clergy in the late mediaeval church, but there’s no smoke without fire… John Hooper, who was burned at the stake for heresy on this day in 1555, was Bishop of Gloucester (1550-52) and Bishop of Worcester and Gloucester (1552-54), and in the former role conducted a visitation of his diocese in 1551. He examined 311 clerics, of whom 168 could not recite the Ten Commandments, 31 did not know in what part of Scripture they could be found (Exodus and Deuteronomy), 40 did not know where the Lord’s Prayer was written (Gospels of St Mark and St Luke), and 31 could not say who had written it (um, Jesus).

8. Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, who was Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 to 1944 and who died today in 1959, allied himself and his country with Nazi Germany after 1939. He was a Vice-Admiral (Vizeadmiral or Altengernagy). Hungary, of course, is landlocked; Horthy had served in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Navy, the kaiserliche und königliche Kriegsmarine or Császári és Királyi Haditengerészet, from 1896 to 1918, ending the First World War as Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet (Flottenkommandant). His service almost entirely coincided with that of Georg Ritter von Trapp, made famous by The Sound of Music, who only rose to Lieutenant Commander (Korvettenkapitän or Korvettkapitán).

9. The youngest of the 10 von Trapp children, Johannes, is still alive and recently celebrated his 86th birthday. He was born in Philadelphia while his family were undertaking a concert tour and was educated at Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, Dartmouth College and Yale University’s School of Forestry. He worked at the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont, and spent some time in British Columbia and on a ranch in Montana. The lodge is now managed by his son, Sam von Trapp, assisted by his daughter, Kristina von Trapp-Frame.

10. Bill Haley, the rock and roll pioneer, died on this day in 1981, aged only 55. He was blind in his left eye from the age of four after an inner-ear mastoid operation accidentally severed his optic nerve. Other notable people who have or had lost the sight in one eye include former prime minister Gordon Brown (left), author and poet Alice Walker (right), actor Peter Falk (right), former United States president Theodore Roosevelt (left), actor Sir Rex Harrison (left), Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr (left), guitarist Ry Cooder (left), actor Leo McKern (left), dictionary supreme Samuel Johnson (left), actor Johnny Depp (left) and the 13th-century German inquisitor John the One-Eyed. Strangely, Vice-Admiral Viscount Nelson, perhaps the most famous one-eyed man in history, was probably not blind; his right eye was injured by debris during the invasion of Corsica in 1794 but he recovered some sight, enough to “distinguish light from dark but no object”, and made no claim for any pension rights on account of his injury.

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” (Aldous Huxley)

1. “Reform and the long shadow of the Fourth Party”: a thought-provoking essay in Engelsberg Ideas by Harry Cluff which draws parallels between Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the rowdy claque of four Conservative MPs—Lord Randolph Churchill, A.J. Balfour, Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff and John Gorst—who led savage attacks on William Gladstone’s Liberal government of 1880-85 and promoted the nebulous but noisy cause of “Tory Democracy” within their own party. After Benjamin Disraeli’s death in 1881, the Conservatives were led by the Marquess of Salisbury in the House of Lords and Sir Stafford Northcote in the Commons, but Churchill and his allies became known as the “Fourth Party”, the House then comprising MPs from the Conservatives, the Liberal Party and the Home Rule League (which in 1882 morphed into the Irish Parliamentary Party). Cluff argues that the Fourth Party’s eye for publicity, populist appeal and claim to represent a “true” Conservatism stand comparison with Reform UK, though he adds a cautious and downbeat conclusion for Faragistes: “In the end, with a whimper and not a bang, these brilliant blow-hards and parliamentary performers evaporated out of public life”.

2. “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce”: this 1983 essay for Esquire by Tom Wolfe is a typically lively and bravura portrait of Robert Noyce, dubbed the “Mayor of Silicon Valley”, whose development of the silicon microchip enabled the personal computer revolution and the California technology boom. Noyce grew up in Iowa and was a gifted but wayward student at Grinnell College before earning a doctorate in physics at MIT. Wolfe brings to life an extraordinary and restless mind and a career which changed the world, with the sort of verve that made him such a brilliant and revolutionary journalist.

3. “The Company of the Marjolaine”: a short story by the great writer and politician John Buchan, 1st Lord Tweedsmuir, published in The Atlantic in February 1909. A group of American political leaders travel to Italy around the time of the Revolution to meet the ageing Prince Charles Edward, the so-called “Young Pretender” or Bonnie Prince Charlie, and approach him to become monarch of the new state. Suffice to say, the potential sovereign they find, then in his fifties, does not quite meet their expectations. It is a witty and puckish tale, made more entertaining by the way in which Buchan frames it as a real historical episode reconstructed from miscellaneous records. He was an extraordinary and multi-talented man, and I heartily recommend also Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan, by his granddaughter Ursula Buchan.

4. “EastEnders at 40: how soap operas lost the plot”: a fascinating examination of contemporary soap operas by Andrew Billen in The Times reveals a genre in steep decline: audience figures reach the four million mark on a good day—a long way, as he notes, since 30.1 million, more than half the population, watched EastEnders on Christmas Day 1986—episodes are being cut in length and frequency and the last 25 years have seen the disappearance of Brookside, Family Affairs, Holby City and Doctors. Billen attributes this collapse to a range of factors including implausibly melodramatic storylines, inconsistency of editorial control and increasing homogeneity, as well, of course, as the general fragmentation of television audiences. Perhaps the most telling analysis, however, is delivered by Tony Jordan, former lead writer of EastEnders and creator of Hustle and Life on Mars: soap operas are trying to represent a kind of community which no longer exists, one based on physical proximity and neighbourhood solidarity. One other aspect of soap operas has always struck me: the characters never talk about what they’re watching on television.

5. “MAGA Kids: How America’s youth went right”: a fascinating piece from The Spectator by my friend Kara Kennedy Clairmont, who couldn’t write a dull paragraph if she tried, charting the cultural and social changes in Washington DC since the re-election of Donald Trump. The furrowed-brow generalised disapproval of many contemporary progressives had “served to make an already notoriously un-fun and politics-obsessed city even less cool” but it has given way, suddenly and dramatically, to a breezily unapologetic sense of glamour and hedonism. In the words of one restaurateur, the new vibe is “conscious masculinity, unbridled femininity, and long, thoughtful evenings of natural wines by candlelight”. Will the capital ever be the same again?

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music’.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

1. “She”: made especially famous in this country by the Elvis Costello cover used for Notting Hill (1999), of course, this was originally a hit in 1974 for the great Armenian-French singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour, who co-wrote it with frequent collaborator Herbert Kretzmer. The song was written for London Weekend Television’s Seven Faces of Woman, a series of plays examining aspects of modern womanhood, but achieved (deserved) greater resonance and popularity. Although it was commissioned for a British audience, there is something inescapably French about it: romantic, sad, slightly overwrought, swooping yet all delivered in the knowledge that life goes on and there are always Gauloises to be smoked and pastis to be drunk. 2:50 of sheer bliss.

2. “Via con me”: one of Aznavour’s rivals for compellingly louche European popular music is the Piedmontese singer and pianist Paolo Conte, who began as a jazz performer during his early career as an avvocato in his father’s law firm. He recently turned 88, a remarkable musician who somehow melds jazz, boogie and strains of the Francophone chanson tradition, and this 1981 composition, now much covered and imitated, is an infectious if brooding meditation on life, veering from Italian to English and back again. It featured on the soundtrack for 1995’s Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline romantic comedy French Kiss, and if this doesn’t make you feel like a world-weary sophisticate, then I can’t help you.

3. “Ashokan Farewell”: I have said many times and will continue to say that Ken Burns’s nine-part 1990 documentary The Civil War is perhaps the best television ever made, and this tune by American folk musician Jay Ungar features prominently on the soundtrack, playing 25 times in all. Many viewers assumed it was a contemporary Civil War melody but it was written by Ungar in 1982, born of “a sense of loss and longing” at the end of that year’s Ashokan Music and Dance Camps he and his wife Molly Mason host near Ashokan Reservoir in Ulster County, New York. Beautiful, spare, lyrical and plangent.

4. “Spem in alium”: Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-85) was one of the outstanding English composers of the 16th century, serving as a composer and performer at the courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I and negotiating the religious controversies of the Tudor century despite his own apparently unquestioning Catholicism. This motet was composed for 40 singers, eight choirs each comprising five voices, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass, though its date of composition is uncertain: it may have been commissioned in the reign of Mary, around 1556, or may date from around 1570. The Latin text (“Hope in any other”) is taken from a responsory at Matins in the Sarum Rite, adapted from chapter 9 of the Book of Judith. The Sarum Rite was beginning to be superseded by the Book of Common Prayer by the reign of Elizabeth I, while Catholics were increasingly turning to the Roman Missal as revised at the Council of Trent. This performance by the Tallis Scholars gives a sense of the power of choral music in the early modern period and the extraordinary beauty of English polyphony.

5. “I Was Glad”: from Tallis and William Byrd onwards, English choral music has always been at its best for ceremonial occasions, and this setting of the coronation anthem I was glad by Sir Hubert Parry is sternly mighty. The anthem itself had been a feature of coronations since that of Charles I in 1626, the text taken from Psalm 122, but Parry created his arrangement for Edward VII’s coronation in 1902 and revised it for George V in 1911. It was subsequently used for the coronations of Elizabeth II in 1953 and the current King in 2023. The acclamation for the 1953 version, perhaps the most famous, was “Vivat Regina Elizabetha!”, with no need for a second iteration as no consort was crowned. In 2023, it was reworked to include “Vivat Regina Camilla!” and “Vivat Rex Carolus!” A reminder that this is something the British do spectacularly well, but have also been doing for more than a thousand years, so practice might make perfect.

Trusting in Him who can go with me…

… as Abraham Lincoln told the crowd in Springfield, Illinois, before he left for Washington in 1861, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

I mean, not really, obviously. TTFN.