On the first day of freshman year, my Pre-AP English literature teacher, Mrs Pauley, gave us an exam that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since.

The exam had a hundred questions, and was designed to test our knowledge of something she called “cultural literacy”: history, television, film, popular music, famous lines by William Shakespeare, and so on.

At the time I don’t suppose I thought much of it—surely everyone knows the composer of “Ode to Joy”?—but as high school lengthened I met more people and uncovered frightening levels of ignorance. Legal adults—soon to graduate! who had spent twelve years or more in public schools!—who had never heard of Josef Stalin or Henry VIII, who couldn’t remember the word for “God” (“Isn’t that the Dude who made the world?” are actual words someone said to me).

This was in 2003 and 2004. It’s only gotten worse in the smartphone era. Today, this morning, someone tried to tell me that Alexandre Dumas has “been dead for two millennia,” a statement that calls into question their history, math and possibly reading skills. Last week a man informed me that Citizen Kane and King Arthur were movies with all-white casts, and thus of no interest to people of color. When I inquired further, he revealed that he thought King Arthur had originated with the movie of that name released in 2004. He was not aware of any previous King Arthur media. A very pious lady then added that the tales of King Arthur mustn’t be taught in school because they were written by Freemasons. (“If you really think that, it’s a wonder you can tie your own shoes,” I replied.)

I’m afraid America is nearing Philemona Cunk levels of stupidity. We are less informed than a comedian who pretends to be stupid on television.

I’ve seen a theory about literacy floated on social media, and it makes intuitive sense to me. The fact that American students, including elite college students, are struggling to read, has been widely reported. Professors at Yale and Harvard are cutting back on their assigned texts because students can’t complete the material. There are a number of things going on here—the ubiquity of screens, the short-sighted scuttling of phonics instruction—but one is simply this: kids are confused by the information contained in books because there are very basic historical, literary and cultural allusions that we have stopped teaching, and thus they don’t know. Jacob and Esau, Dick Whittington and his cat, Jack the Giant-Killer—you ask them to explain any of these enduring cultural symbols and they stare at you with blank faces. (Compound that with the average person’s lack of knowledge of the natural world, and it’s no wonder that they feel nothing when they read, say, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”) There was much discussion last year about a study finding that English literature majors at U. S. colleges could not parse the majestic first paragraph of Bleak House; one student, apparently thrown by the mention of “whiskers,” thought it had something to do with a cat. But if you’ve never been taught English history, and your only association with Lincoln is Honest Abe, how are you going to make sense of the words, “Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall?” What, to the American, is Michaelmas?

Helen Vendler, who taught literature at Harvard, Cornell and Boston University, warned in 1980 of the devastation that the removal of cultural literacy from curricula would inflict. In an address to the Modern Language Association of America, she said:

“Our students come to us from secondary school having read no works of literature in foreign languages and scarcely any works of literature in their own language. The very years, between twelve and eighteen, when they might be reading rapidly, uncritically, rangingly, happily, thoughtlessly, are somehow dissipated without cumulative force. Those who end their education with secondary school have been cheated altogether of their literary inheritance, from the Bible to Robert Lowell. It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to. With a reformed curriculum beginning in preschool, all children would know about the Prodigal Son and the Minotaur; they would know the stories presumed by our literature, as children reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales once knew them. We can surely tell them the tales before they can read Shakespeare or Ovid; there are literary forms appropriate to every age, even the youngest. Nothing is more lonely than to go through life uncompanioned by a sense that others have also gone through it, and have left a record of their experience. Every adult needs to be able to think of Job, or Orpheus, or Circe, or Ruth, or Lear, or Jesus, or the Golden Calf, or the Holy Grail, or Antigone in order to refer private experience to some identifying frame or solacing reflection.”

To paraphrase Katherine Rundell, those who deny children the inheritance of these stories are thieves. “We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books”—and, I would add, that schools have abandoned their first mandate to produce culturally informed youth. We are all now reaping the consequences.

On that cheerful note… let’s test your cultural literacy!

01. Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine had three sons who became kings. One was Henry the Young King. Who were the others?

02. In the 1974 Carl Douglas disco hit ”Kung Fu Fighting,” “those fools” were as fast as what meteorological phenomenon?

03. In William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Mark Antony asks “friends” and “Romans” to lend him this appendage.

04. On 08 February, 1983, 105 million Americans tuned in to watch “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the feature-length finale of which acclaimed TV series?

05. Rudyard Kipling included this ancient symbol, once associated with luck, at the front of his books, until events of the 1930s compelled him to disavow its use.

06. The Owl and the Pussycat in Edward Lear’s poem went to sea in a “beautiful” boat of this color.

07. On 03 August, 1914, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously said these were going out all over Europe; “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

08. This martial artist and boxer turned actor played a larger-than-life bounty hunter who attempts to steal a baby in the Coen Brothers’ 1987 crime caper Raising Arizona.

09. John Keats had this bird in mind when he wrote, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.”

10. This philosopher, excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam on 27 July, 1656, wrote a treatise on ethics that was translated into English by a great admirer, George Eliot.

11. “You best start believing in” these stories, Captain Barbossa informs Elizabeth Swann in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl; “you’re in one.”

12. Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV penitently knelt in the snow for several days seeking absolution from Pope Gregory VII outside the gates of this castle—a feat that present-day rulers might consider emulating.

13. When this admiral in the Union Navy was warned of the presence of torpedoes in nearby waters, he exclaimed, “Damn the torpedoes!”

14. He tells Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

15. This Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex converted to Christianity, renounced his kingship and retired to a monastery, only to be dragged out by supporters and forced to lead an army against invaders; refusing to bear arms, he was promptly slain.

16. “The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked,” warned this preacher in a 1741 sermon that inaugurated the Great Awakening.

17. “I am known in the world, and the world is wide,” brags this polymath in a song performed by the Decemberists for the Hamilton mixtape. He also has the distinction of being the only Founding Father to have an episode of The Office (U. S.) named after him.

18. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” says the title heroine in the first line of this rain-soaked Victorian-era novel, published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

19. Actor Gregory Peck so loved the works of this English novelist that he sent copies to his son stationed in Vietnam.

20. Ben Stiller travels to Iceland in this 2013 film about a negative assets manager who struggles with daydreams, loosely adapted from a short story by James Thurber.

21. This biblical monarch, a “man after God’s own heart,” was forbidden to build the temple in Jerusalem, according to the prophet Nathan, because “thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood.”

22. Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s 1970 jibe about “nattering nabobs of negativism” was penned by this speechwriter who later became a New York Times columnist.

23. This Romantic-era composer penned the Trout Quintet and a symphony that was never finished.

24. “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? Or press down his tongue with a cord?” God opines from a whirlwind to the long-suffering protagonist of this book.

25. Famously bigoted president Woodrow Wilson screened this influential film at the White House, after which he reportedly said, “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true.”

26. He and a gang of friends “stole a huge load of pears,” which they then fed to hogs. Later in life, partly owing to the influence of his mother, St. Monica, he converted and became Bishop of Hippo.

27. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, this famed island monastery was first ravaged by “heathen savages,” the Vikings, in 793; it was also the setting of the 2025 Danny Boyle film 28 Years Later.

28. In the film Casablanca, Ilsa and Laszlo are seeking letters of transit signed by this future French president, who was also the subject of an assassination plot in the 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal.

29. “Of all men else I have avoided thee, but get thee back! My soul is too much charg’d with blood of thine already,” says Macbeth, near the end of his titular play, to this man not of woman born.

30. “Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo / If we haven’t enough to doo-oo-oo / We get the hump / Cameelious hump / The hump that is” what two colors, according to this Rudyard Kipling rhyme?





You’ll find the answers below the jump.

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“Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’”

The one who doubted:

that was what they called me.

No one remembered

the bravery I had shown

on the way to Bethany—

bravery or was it despair I felt

remembering the failed revolutions

the cousins murdered

Miriam straining to deliver

and dying or ere they were born,

our two sons.

The eddies of dust

over which our fathers walked

in ages past are trampled under

by the eagle’s talons

luxury sits grinning and contented

in the temple

making a mockery of Abraham

and Abraham’s God

The flower of youth perishes

on the hilltops of Judea

and hope is a luxury

for fools and charlatans.

Yet there was one who was not hopeless

Quiet and resolved

Upon his dark brow lingered a celestial light.

Though we had been abandoned by all

He had not abandoned us

And I was resolved not to forsake him

Even with the expectation of death encroaching

Death sadistic and perverse.

So call me not doubting

for it wasn’t my faith that forsook me

on that night in the garden

when they led him away

when they bound him to a fiery wheel

when the hounds of hell stood baying

round the tree where he hung suspended

where the crude lance entered

and his mother lay pierced at the root

no, it wasn’t my faith.

It was hope.

Hope was enshrouded

and lain in a tomb

and a stone was laid over its mouth

and into the whale’s jaws

poured the blackness of darkness

and the mountains of the sea were silent.

And the serpent of death

glutted and imposing

stretched its victorious coils

round the sleeping world.

* * *

When they talk about me

ages hence

this is all they will remember:

the scorn on my face

when I heard they had raised him

when they said he had been sighted

walking towards Emmaus

breaking bread and disappearing

amid quiet laughter.

Buoyed with renewed expectation

they floated together

and I stood alone on the seashore

and the stars of twilight twinkled

as the shadows gathered round me.

And whenever the story is told

they’ll laugh at me for not believing

though if you had been there with us

you’d have had your questions

and they all gathered round him

and I lingered at the edges

feeling faint with confusion and sadness

as the smell of frankincense and spikenard

filled the dusty room.

And when the commotion settled

and the twelve spread apart

there he was

and he motioned me forward

and it wasn’t a ghost nor a trance

he was just as alive as he had been

three days before

and I had no idea how to account for that

because I had known all along he was going to die

and the best I could have hoped for was to die alongside him.

But when I saw the wrists

where the wounds of betrayal burned dully

when I dipped my hand in the well

where the waters of life had poured out

when I brushed the skin of my arms

against the hair on the back of his neck

the embers of injustice blew away into nothing

and bitterness exhausted itself and was silent.

Years from now

when my desire is finally granted

when my blood seeps over the barbaric stones

of some desolate isle

and my body grows cold and rigid

pierced by the four lances

when death comes gliding over the seas to meet me

like a ghostly mirage of one I loved long ago

then I’ll go with it fearless and undaunted

over mountains and forests

through green fields fettered with frost

where feet of saints will walk in times far off

through the primordial depths

where the monsters of chaos will battle

until one comes to free them

and the dust of the tomb is plundered

and the ransacked loam walks jubilant

along the silent, sun-rimmed seas.

During my final year at university, a friend, Ben, explained to me that I could request items for the library to purchase.

“You don’t want to do it too often,” said Ben, “or they’ll start ignoring you. But if you want a book that’s not already in their collection, you can go online and ask them to acquire it.”

For someone who spent most of my waking hours in the library, this was a moment breathtaking in its potential. A light (as Dickens said) shone on my path. After years of quiet scheming, I had been vouchsafed a new and hitherto hidden spell for summoning books.

Not wanting to abuse the privilege, I deliberated for several days over the important question of what should be my first acquisition request. Then, one bright morning in spring, I pulled up the library’s website and requested the Arkangel Complete Works of Shakespeare on audio—a six-hundred-dollar purchase.

And the library bought it.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. At the time, Arkangel was deemed the gold standard for Shakespeare audio dramas. The production is superb, and the recordings feature some of Britain’s finest actors in plumb roles: David Tennant as Edgar, Bob Peck as Prospero and Claudius, Jennifer Ehle as Miranda, Adrian Lester as Ariel, the great Anton Lesser as Kent, Niamh Cusack as Rosalind and Viola, Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, Roger Allam as Petruchio and the Duke of Vienna, Bill Nighy as Antonio, David Troughton as Richard III—the list goes on and on.

I have many fond memories of university, but one of my very favorites was that first evening after the Arkangel boxed set arrived at the library. Straightaway I borrowed Cymbeline (no idea why I started with that one) and made my way to the campus lounge. Pulling out my portable CD player (“very old school!” Ben had called it), I inserted the first disc and selected a scene at random. It was the famous scene in which the baddie, Iachimo, sneaks into the slumbering Imogen’s bedroom and observes her, partially naked, as she sleeps. (This is not the Arkangel, but it gives you a sense of the moment—Iachimo is played by Anton Lesser, the inimitable):

The crickets sing, and man’s o’er-labour’d sense
Repairs itself by rest. Our Tarquin thus
Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken’d
The chastity he wounded. Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom’st thy bed, fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!
But kiss; one kiss! Rubies unparagon’d,
How dearly they do’t! ‘Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ the taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids,
To see the enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows, white and azure laced
With blue of heaven’s own tinct …
O sleep, thou ape of death, lie dull upon her,
And be her sense but as a monument,
Thus in a chapel lying!

The reason Iachimo has found himself sequestered in a chest in Imogen’s chamber is because he made an ill-advised bet with her lover, Posthumus Leonatus, that he could induce her to sleep with him. Thus, as he glances around the room, he seeks evidence to show that he’s been there (“But my design: to note the chamber, I will write all down”), in a passage that still retains its power to transfix and horrify:

On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’ the bottom of a cowslip: here’s a voucher,
Stronger than ever law could make: this secret
Will force him think I have pick’d the lock and ta’en
The treasure of her honour. No more. To what end?
Why should I write this down, that’s riveted,
Screw’d to my memory? She hath been reading late
The tale of Tereus; here the leaf’s turned down
Where Philomel gave up. I have enough:
To the trunk again, and shut the spring of it.
Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning
May bear the raven’s eye! I lodge in fear;
Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here.

The experience of hearing this in my headphones for the first time bordered on the sublime. The production, the pauses, the intonations… it was perfect. These actors have a knack for delivering their lines in such a way that you immediately know and understand what’s taking place, even if you don’t have your Complete Works or a study guide handy. They are able to bring out the music of the poetry, so that listening to Shakespeare feels a lot like… well, music. It’s become a trope in recent years to portray Shakespeare as being a sort of sixteenth-century rock star, and he was. These monologues are guitar solos. They’re hypnotically hooky and irresistibly infectious.

Here, for example, is David Tennant as the Porter in Macbeth, for Arkangel:

I listened to a truly shocking amount of Shakespeare that summer. I uploaded each of the plays to my computer (today I just buy them on Audible) and burned my favorite scenes onto a CD which I played during my evening walks—the prison monologue at the end of Richard II, the opening to Merchant of Venice, Prospero’s first scene in The Tempest, acts two and three of Lear, a number of scenes from Macbeth (in which I had played Banquo onstage the previous autumn), my favorite being the immortal banquet scene (which Hugh Ross, as the title character, somehow transmutes into black comedy).

Almost by accident I began to memorize them. I’ll say this: there’s nothing like having Shakespeare in your ears every day to help you learn the plays. There’s joy in being able to pull a line from the air “at will,” and it’s not just the base pleasure of getting to show off a bit of one’s learning. These words become part of you. They sink deep into your bones. They became for me a friend and comfort in my loneliest hours. (And not only me: as a youth Hans Christian Anderson, friendless and alone, would recite the plays to himself for hours as he walked the snowy streets of Odense.)

In October 2023, Judi Dench appeared on The Graham Norton Show and recited Sonnet 29, “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” A clip from the show became massively popular on social media, with a number of people attesting that they were moved to tears on hearing the words spoken aloud, for what I suspect was the first time in many years. It had the feel of the famous moment in Fahrenheit 451 when Montag reads an illegal poem, “Dover Beach,” at a house party, and a friend of his wife’s breaks down sobbing because she senses the misery and poverty of her life. If you want to know why everyone feels defeated and demoralized, it’s because art and literature and theater and natural splendor, all the things that gave life meaning, have been stripped from public life. We live in a culture that gives ugliness instead of beauty, scrolling instead of poetry, and we are starving for both.

And in a climate such as this, putting Shakespeare to memory becomes an act of resistance.

Below the jump I’ll share some suggestions for favorite scenes from the plays to get you started.

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The first thing you learn about writing fiction is that most books on writing fiction are useless.

I’m talking about the cottage industry of books like Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Writes a Novel that all seem to have been penned by people who have never published anything else. You can tell when a writer is grifting because he (or she) over-promises and under-delivers. Each of these books would have you thinking that the secret of writing great stories is to follow a ten- or fifteen-point outline dreamt up by the author. One book insists there are “choke points” five and ten percent of the way through every bestseller. Blake Snyder is adamant that every classic work of fiction follows the story structure template revealed in his trademark “beat sheet”; his attempts to prove this with examples leads him to say very silly things about, for instance, the plot of Great Expectations.

Now, having said that… there are exceptions. You will find the occasional book written by a professional author, screenwriter or editor that takes a practical approach to the craft of writing fiction. John Yorke, a writer for EastEnders who now teaches television writing for the BBC, has penned Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story, an invaluable resource. Children’s and YA books editor Cheryl B. Klein—one of my favorite humans—gave us The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults, an encyclopaedic dissection of writing, not only for children but for all ages. Editor Donald Maass has written some really excellent things about the importance of micro-conflict, the small conflicts (both internal and external) that give a story urgency, and the beauty of a well-structured scene. There is a chapter in Karl Iglesias’s book Writing for Emotional Impact that proved foundational for me when I was first learning how to write. Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman have both written lovely essay collections reflecting on the craft. The Writing Excuses podcast, helmed by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal, is full of sound advice and hard-earned authorial wisdom. Andy Martin wrote a very strange and wonderful book, Reacher Said Nothing, in which he shadowed the author of the Jack Reacher books, Lee Child, for a whole year and teased out his writing process. Russell T. Davies’ book The Writer’s Tale is a reassuring read if you ever watched Doctor Who and wrongly thought, “I bet he enjoys writing these scripts and is not at all stressed.”

This essay isn’t a compendium of things I learned reading those books and listening to those podcasts, though I will quote from them when it illustrates a point. Rather, this is a list of things I learned via trial-and-error over the past decade by writing millions of words. Back in 2015, wanting to write novels but knowing I lacked the experience, I started ghostwriting genre fiction for anyone who would hire me. In this manner I wrote seven to ten novels (possibly more) and countless novellas, all of them under pen names. Most notably, I spent four years writing a mystery series about a couple of very literate old ladies who solve crimes in a small town. Because my client gave very loose supervision, I drafted the plots and created most of the characters. By the time I finished the final novella in November 2023, I had written 800,000 words about these two ladies—and writing the final chapters, knowing I was dismissing “some portion of myself into the shadowy world” forever, was a rather melancholy experience.

And I’ll be honest: the novels and novellas I wrote between 2015 and 2017 were terrible. Awful. But the ones I wrote in the two years that followed were a bit better. Each year I learned new things (“always conceal the climactic deus ex machina in an earlier chapter” was a big one; “structure each scene so that it builds to a point and then ends, otherwise you will have an aimless, shapeless scene that does nothing and goes nowhere” was another). I made small improvements, and those improvements began to add up. Now I’m midway through my first novel written under my own name, and seemingly each week brings some new insight into the process. Maybe in a year or two I’ll update this list with what I learned writing the second half of that book. Until then, here’s what I’ve gleaned through myriad mistakes and fumbles. May it prove useful to you.

01. For the sake of increasing reader suspense and intrigue, it helps to give characters a vague sense of foreboding. Agatha Christie does this at the beginning of every mystery.

02. When plotting a scene, it helps to ask what the hero is trying to accomplish, what opponents or obstacles stand in his or her way (and what they want), and how the push-pull of negotiation builds to a climax that results in a new status quo by the end of the scene or chapter. Avoid scenes with no goals that don’t build to a moment of resolution.

03. Chapters should generally tell small, self-contained stories with clear beginnings and endings that leave the reader with a question. These small arcs are very satisfying.

04. It sometimes helps to open a story with a moment of menace or supernatural intrigue before introducing the main plot. (Shakespeare does this.) That opening scene will hook the reader enough to keep them reading through the subsequent exposition.

05. The secret of writing emotionally powerful stories is to create characters the reader loves or hates. The reader won’t care what’s happening in the plot if she doesn’t engage with the characters. The trick is to establish that emotional connection early in the story.

06. Readers love vulnerable characters staring down hopeless odds, which is why orphan stories (for example) are perennially popular. John Yorke: “You don’t have to force any emotions. All you have to do is make your audience care for your main character.”

07. Beginning writers place too much importance on writing perfect plots. Excess plotting can make a story feel inorganic. Lee Child says the plot in a given story is driven by the baddies. The hero is the one trying to prevent the plot from happening.

08. Plot is merely the practice of setting things up and paying them off in such a way that the reader feels there is a guiding hand at work shaping the narrative. Plot builds reader intrigue, but character is what keeps readers invested.

09. A highly developed and unusual narrative voice can elevate an otherwise generic story (see, for example, the Lemony Snicket books). It helps to be distinctive and weird in general. Avoid writing clichéd baddies; specificity of character is what compels us.

10. Throw a bit of humor into tense moments and a bit of suspense into funny moments. Shift moods. Freely intermingle comedy and drama (what Dickens called “streaky bacon”). Vince Gilligan attributes the success of his shows to this blend of darkness and humor.

11. John Yorke: “Drama demands conflict on a scene-by-scene level. If Sipowitz wants a drink, then the barman must not serve him; if President Bartlet wants to get out of bed, then his wife must forbid him.”

12. Even the dullest scene can be enlivened by giving a minor character a few words of dialogue expressing their fears or desires. We feel intrigued by them instantly. Intimate self-disclosure is essential to creating chemistry between two characters.

13. The emotions of the audience can be powerfully galvanized if they feel a sense of moral outrage over the mistreatment of the hero or heroes. Dickens is very skilled at this, as is James Cameron.

14. The reader should grasp what the protagonist is seeking to accomplish early on. In a large ensemble, characters may be introduced as clearly defined types whose motivations can be summed up in a sentence or two (and can be further developed later).

15. Mary Anne Mohanraj: “If your character wants something badly, it almost doesn’t matter what it is that they want, because the reader will empathize with this desire for something that they want badly. It’s sort of instant reader identification.”

16. Both Vonnegut and Dickens argue that the trick to keeping a reader reading is to arouse their curiosity. There’s the mystery of what’s going to happen next and, in a whodunit, the mystery of what characters are hiding. (Lee Child: “You ask or imply a question at the beginning of the book and you absolutely self-consciously withhold the answer. It does feel cheap and meretricious but it absolutely works.”)

17. Vonnegut: “Give your readers familiar props along the way. In Alice in Wonderland, remember, when she’s falling down the hole there are all these familiar, comforting objects along the sides: cupboards and bookshelves and maps. Orange marmalade.”

18. In each book the stakes for the protagonist must be intensely personal. (If you study how the plot of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix changed between outline and writing, all the major changes involved making the stakes more personal for Harry.)

19. There should be moments in a story that have nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. Readers imagine that they want the story to be a plot-delivery service, but they don’t. Those character-centric pauses ground the proceedings in a sense of realism.

20. The writers of Better Call Saul began plotting each episode by asking not, “What we do want to happen next?” but, “What are the characters thinking and feeling at this moment?” That settled, they discussed what might happen to a person in that mindset.

21. Literary, cultural and historical references can make a story less accessible for the average reader. Agatha Christie avoided them almost entirely.

22. Half the power of writing a series is watching the core cast grow and evolve, but you can fill out the world of the story with dozens of minor characters who return at intervals, and the combination of setting and characters gives momentum to the story that grows as the series goes on, so that in later installments you can draw on that bench of supporting players to engage the reader.

23. Shift between (concise) outlining and discover-writing. Says the Writing Excuses Podcast: “There isn’t room for a whole book in your head, and you can’t keep going until you get some things down on paper.” Mary R. Kowal adds, “You don’t actually need a really detailed outline.”

24. The biggest mistake writers make in their first chapter is throwing a bunch of things at the reader in the hopes of winning their attention (what Cheryl Klein calls “concept-itis”). Confident writers know it’s better to take your time introducing characters and setting up the story.

25. The hero or heroine should go through a “try-fail cycle,” in which she attempts to defeat the baddie or solve the mystery and her attempts fail. This not only withholds answers from the reader but shows us the heroine’s character in action. (I reviewed a 600-page would-be epic in which the heroes succeed in their first outing, and it tore all the tension from the story.)

26. One trick to sustaining reader engagement is to include small small acts of violence in each chapter. (Note how often this is done in Harry Potter.) According to Writing Excuses, “If there is no violence in a book it can be hard to maintain tension.”

27. John Yorke: “Niceness tends to kill characters—if there is nothing wrong with them, nothing to offend us, there’s almost certainly nothing to attract our attention either.” We are drawn to characters (like Snape or Sydney Carton) who are a bit morally ambiguous.

28. Roald Dahl says the aspiring writer for children must understand that kids love a story that contains a threat: for example, one crocodile chatting with another about eating a plump, juicy child. Kids love the shiver of fear the threat induces. They like being scared.

29. A good story needs a combination of organic and inorganic plotting. Organic plotting is when the characters drive the story through their interactions. Inorganic plotting is when the author intervenes to nudge the story in a certain direction. Both are necessary.

30. In a longer story, subplots keep the story from feeling one-note and add further layers of complexity. At the center of each subplot is a character, and the subplot is driven by the goals and desires of that character. Ideally each of your major secondary characters should have their own arc.

31. Lois Duncan: “There’s a basic three-part structure to all genre novels: (1) Someone the reader relates to (2) reaches an important goal (3) by overcoming increasingly difficult obstacles… The more important the goal, the stronger the story.”

32. Always remember Strunk & White’s example of a good sentence: “Clyde resigned last spring as executive sales manager of the Indiana Flotex Company and is now a gondolier in Venice.” It’s good because it’s unpretentious, detailed, informative, concise.

33. For fantasy writers, it can be tempting to spend years building a world. Readers don’t need depth but rather the illusion of depth. A story should lend the impression that there are things the reader isn’t being shown, which makes the world feel bigger than it is.

34. Wish-fulfillment is essential to the success of any story: the desire to feel special, to feel seen, to be heroic, to live in a place that’s perilous but inviting, to be vindicated in front of one’s foes, to have a powerful & enigmatic protector. Think Cinderella. Dickens.

35. There must be an undercurrent of tension running through the book to keep readers engaged. Suspense is maintained by raising questions, placing beloved characters in peril and heavy use of foreboding (the recurring suggestion that something bad might happen). If a scene is failing, it’s typically because there’s no urgency, no tension.

36. The episode in the Mahabharata involving Drona and his pupil Ekalavya highlights an important storytelling principle: death is not always the worst thing that can happen to a character. You have to find the thing they care about the most and take that from them.

37. Karl Iglesias on plot: “Creating the story is the easy part, in my opinion; choosing how to tell that story on the page in a way that will captivate, mesmerize, and fascinate the reader is where the challenge comes in—that’s what craft is all about.”

38. Children’s mystery novelist Robin Stevens says the main thing in a mystery is to plot the crime—to know how it was committed, where, why, by whom. The rest of the story can develop organically as characters react to the situation—which is what the reader really wants to see, above all.

39. Readers love when a character has a burning hatred, because it suggests a goal, but they also love when a character creates a persona to mask their true self. (As John Yorke says, we are fascinated by secret identities and the heart at war with itself.)

40. When writing a scene in which a character reacts to a situation, resist the temptation to write the obvious emotion. Dig deep for the unexpected emotion. Have the hero be angry when we assume they’re going to be overjoyed. Sow conflict and discord.

41. I find it helps to plan conversations between two or more characters by plotting them first in bullet points. This, alongside writing a few pages about what each character is thinking and feeling when a chapter begins, results in very effective outlining.

42. If a conversation isn’t working on the page, I sometimes find it’s because one or both participants lack a goal and are passive. These conversations can be riveting if they are each seeking different things and are slowly negotiating their way to a compromise.

43. The set-up at the beginning of a scene can be made invisible if implied at the close of the previous scene: “Indeed, it’s possible for each scene to consist solely of the period of confrontation … the drama is then built around confrontation / crisis in a sequence that never seems to stop moving.” (John Yorke)

44. Note the structure of J. K. Rowling’s chapters. A problem is introduced in the opening scene (or the previous chapter). Much of the dialogue that follows is then devoted to solving the problem. Fights are used to disguise exposition. Minor characters pop in to make statements that tie back to the central mystery. Most characters have one trait, or a defining trait, which makes the story easier to follow.

45. The first draft of any scene you write will likely be spectacularly awful; the trick is to get the draft written so you can then polish it to perfection. V. E. Schwab says readers only think her books are perfect because they’ve gone through “thirty coats of paint.”

46. The structure of goal-obstacle-conflict keeps a story very tightly focused (and fun!). Most of the conflict will consist of dialogue between characters attempting to negotiate a way round the obstacle.

47. In the Harry Potter books, character interactions from chapter to chapter create small-scale interpersonal conflicts that must be addressed, & the bulk of each chapter is devoted to these realistic, and organically arising, subplots. This is how the books stay grounded. (Important also to note that these conflicts typically can’t be outlined in advance; they spring up naturally as you write the story.)

48. Lastly: experience writing will be your greatest instructor. There are certain things that no book on writing can teach you. There are things you simply can’t know about writing fiction until you’ve written a great deal of fiction.

Possibly my biggest disappointment with the contemporary world is the low esteem in which art, literature, history, the humanities, beauty — the so-called “unnecessary things” — are held, by both the general public and by a growing number of elites. The University of Iowa recently announced that it’s shuttering its classics department. Parents in New York report that their kids are graduating without having been assigned to read a full book. We’ve built machines that promise to relieve the burden of painting, writing fan-fiction and even playing video games so that we have more time to look at our phones. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we live in an ugly, degraded culture wherein artists, novelists and other creators are held in contempt.

It wasn’t always like this. In the spring issue of Art in America, my thoughtful and dapper brother-in-law John Murphy writes about the New Deal and how Roosevelt’s policies empowered visual artists by returning art to the public square. Drawing on research he did for his recent book New Deal Art: Culture and Crisis in the Great Depression, John argues that Depression-era investment in the arts demonstrated an engagement with culture that seems otherworldly in our current climate of disdain for the things that enable human flourishing:

Imagine a world where an artist is considered an essential worker. The government commissions murals and sculptures for schools, libraries, and hospitals. Taxes fund free classes in pottery and printmaking at a community art center. The president of the United States promotes art as vital to a healthy democracy.

This world flickered into view between 1933 and 1943, a decade when the US government treated art as a public resource rather than a private luxury. The output was staggering: hundreds of thousands of artworks — murals, paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs — by then-unknown artists like Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. They belonged to the era’s bold vision of cultural democracy: art by the people, for the people.

John goes on to discuss how the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), Section of Painting and Sculpture, and Federal Art Project employed jobbing artists in beautifying school campuses, building sculptures for courthouses and post offices, designing murals for midsize airports. “The FAP championed self-taught artists for their ‘poetry of the soil,’ in Cahill’s words,” he writes. “Josephine Joy’s canvases teem with San Diego’s pepper trees and aloe plants. Pedro Cervantes painted jewellike vistas of New Mexico’s tablelands. Time Magazine declared Southwestern sculptor Patrocino Barela the ‘discovery of the year’ in 1936 for his compactly powerful wood bultos. William Edmondson, born to enslaved parents in Tennessee, carved stone figures on the WPA in Nashville.”

More excerpts, and some concluding thoughts, after the jump.

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I ran by the library on Saturday to pick up a copy of Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth that I’d placed on hold a few days before. While there I was surprised to see that another hold had just arrived: Paul Kingsnorth’s recent bestseller Against the Machine: On the Making and Unmaking of Humanity. Kingsnorth is an English writer now living in Ireland who’s acquired a following via his relentless critiques of modernity, which he views as threatening the natural world and the human spirit. A former pagan who converted to Christianity in 2020, his books are beloved by the sort of person who subscribes to Plough Quarterly.

I began reading the preface whilst sitting with my niece in the children’s section of the library and was immediately struck by the parallels between his argument and some of my recent posts. His general sense of gloom and despair matches my own of late:

Meanwhile, out in what is called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastasizing machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.

This world, you can see, is already on its way out, if it is not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what is being tarmacked and neatened and rationalised into oblivion, and the depths of what is leaving, but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong. Everybody tells you that you feel this because you are infected with something called ‘nostalgia’, or that you picked up a dose of ‘Luddism’ or ‘Romanticism’ at a party or in a doctor’s waiting room. Basically, there is something wrong with you. You don’t understand Progress, which is always and everywhere a Good Thing.

It’s hard not to despair. Shelley said poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” If only! Today no one knows how to read a poem. Adults who should know better use words like “based” and “mogged” and the r-word and “NPC.” We’re governed by ultra-rich philistines who, as Joyce Carol Oates said of Elon Musk, have no joys, no hobbies, no sense of beauty, have never been delighted by a turn of phrase or the light in a cathedral’s windows. I’m solemnly assured by men on Twitter that C. S. Lewis would have rejoiced in the invention of AI (this despite everything Lewis himself wrote on the subject), that within a few months or a year at most AI will have replaced teachers, books and films, and that this is progress, this is something to be celebrated. There is no longer any need to learn history, because all the previous centuries of human invention were merely building to the glorious moment when a man could instantly generate a video of Tom Cruise battling Pikachu aboard a moving train. I’m supposed to shut up and be grateful that I live in this moment. And if I dare to suggest that we’re headed in the wrong direction, that a world in which most children are addicted to screens and fewer and fewer adults know how to read, is a world that’s rapidly unraveling, I’m branded a heretic, a Luddite, an elitist who lacks the decency to Let People Enjoy Things.

If I sound bitter, I suppose it’s because I am. Early in the twentieth century, ordinary young men wrote letters in the trenches that bore the unmistakable influence of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Housman. Tragically, all those men died in the war and now we’re left with Andrew Tate telling a generation of boys he’s too intelligent to read books. English majors have become the ultimate baddie because we insist that others have standards, have taste, that they write their own emails, that they read a great book rather than silently yielding to Hollywood’s bastardization of said book. Against the powers of Isengard, alas, there can be no victory. The Orcs have already won.

I haven’t yet abandoned all hope. Anecdotally it seems that many young people are now turning against generative AI because their favorite illustrators, filmmakers, writers and game designers are speaking out against the use of AI in the creative arts. It’s possible that a consensus is forming that AI should never be used to generate things we should enjoy making ourselves, that the act of having a computer write a novel or make a film is deeply embarrassing. In the past year or two we’ve seen a similar consensus forming that kids shouldn’t waste their most formative years watching brainless videos on iPads. It’s a bit overdue, but these are encouraging trends.

At the end of his book Demons and Spirits of the Land, the late French folklorist Claude LeCouteux laments the passing away of pre-modern systems of belief in words that very much echo those of Paul Kingsnorth. He writes:

Not so long ago, our elders could still tell ethnologists the names of the local spirits, and Charles Joisten gathered an impressive collection of them in the Alps during the 1960s. But now this memory is fading away rapidly as well-being and prosperity no longer depend upon the spirits, but instead upon economic factors. People know where rain and hail comes from, what diseases decimate livestock, and what causes floods. The world has been explored and explained, and stripped of its poetry—alas! People no longer gain control of their property through intimidating rites; they purchase it in the presence of a notary. People no longer go to the fairy fountain; they turn on a faucet. Fortunately, the spirits survive and they emerge from the shadows every time a writer goes back to our roots and does not hesitate to draw inspiration from local beliefs or books from the past. These writers perform a good deed by passing on to us and our children the memory of a bygone world in which spirits were inseparable from humans.

Perhaps this is the task to which writers are called in these times: to preserve the memory of much that’s in danger of being forgotten and lost against a new Dark Age.

Today brings another painfully embarrassing take, this one courtesy of “Gun Lover’s Club,” an account with over 800,000 followers on Twitter. In response to a post claiming that Gen Z is abandoning reading “in record numbers,” Gun Lover writes:

“Reading books is seriously overrated these days. People act like cracking open a 400-page book is the only path to wisdom or success, but honestly, in 2026 you can pretty much just ask Grok anything you want to know.”

Where to begin? One might accuse me of selectively spotlighting the worst opinions online, but sadly Gun Lover’s perspective is increasingly common among the tech-addled. Hugely popular conservative influencer Tim Pool recently tweeted, “Universal literacy was a mistake.” A worrying number of adults on TikTok admitted that they are struggling to finish reading Wuthering Heights because it’s “too hard.” In the past several months I’ve been informed that “there’s no point in teaching Canterbury Tales to high school kids,” that if students are exposed to new things it will make them hate learning, that using print dictionaries and reading on the subway are “performative” & pretentious (but being on your phone is not). This morning the Washington Post announced that it will be ending its books coverage, and there are currently about a hundred folks in my mentions explaining to me why this is right and good. As someone else noted, the idea that reading is a waste of time has become the functional mindset of most people, whether or not they admit it.

And look, I haven’t completely given up hope that reading will have a revival—especially as AI makes the internet effectively unusable, driving growing numbers of people offline. There are reasons for hope. Schools are banning phones, whole countries (Australia, the Netherlands, France, Spain) have banned social media for kids and teens in the past couple months. Parents seem to be waking up to the fact that they shouldn’t hand tablets to their babies fresh from the womb. (The baddie in the upcoming Toy Story 5 is a child’s tablet.) Anecdotally I’ve seen people saying that Gen Alpha reads more than Gen Z because they haven’t been wholly raised online. We’re seeing significant cultural pushback against the presumptions of Big Tech that they should own your children from the cradle.

We’re at an inflection point, and as I see it, there are two paths open to us. Either we’ll continue to resist the encroachments of tech, acknowledge that a life without hobbies or books is a half-life at best, organize to keep data centers out of our towns and refuse to let AI take over the film and publishing industries... or we won’t. Maybe the forces currently arrayed against us are simply too powerful. Maybe the majority of people want a machine to answer their texts and emails, to write their eulogies, to impersonate their dead loved ones. Maybe future generations of students will sail through school without having read anything, written anything, learned anything. Maybe Gun Lover will have his or her way and Grok will replace bookstores and libraries. Maybe curiosity and learning will come to be seen as relics of an earlier time.

In which case, we are slouching rapidly towards Fahrenheit 451.

And I can’t force you to pick up a book. I’m not going to stand over you imploring you to read Dickens in the night hours as you stare glass-eyed at your screen. But don’t delude yourself that this is progress. Once we had a society in which the overwhelming majority of people were literate; in which children of ten routinely read books by Chesterton and Defoe; in which coal miners built and maintained their own lending libraries; in which it was not unusual for a soldier to write home to his lover, “My love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty chains that nothing but Omnipotence could break.” That society was built by mass literacy, and without literacy, everything that we love—empathy, journalism, democracy, the arts, romance, passion—will be lost. Even if you’re not a reader, you don’t want to live in a world in which most people are unable to read. It will affect you in ways that you currently can scarcely imagine.

As Roger Ebert said shortly before his death, “I sometimes think that we have seen a great civilization destroyed in our lifetimes.”

There’s still time to reverse course, but it would require a commitment to learning and the pursuit of knowledge that few of us are currently demonstrating. Maybe the act of reading daily can’t stave off the apocalypse; but maybe it can, if enough of us begin doing it. The most powerful men in our country have sunk enormous fortunes into making you illiterate, lonely, and perpetually online. They want you friendless and dumb; they want you incapable of having or expressing a single thought. In this climate, against these forces, the ultimate act of resistance is reading; and a revival of literacy may be the only way to prevent the dystopia they are so keen to inflict.

Last night Philip Porter, author and professor of dogmatic, patristic & medieval theology at Saint Louis University, tweeted a worrying anecdote. He wrote:

A first for me: Today a student came to my office hours to tell me that my no technology policy is hard for her because she can’t play video games during class to distract herself from the lecture content.

Now, if you’ve known me long, you know that this post seems designed in a lab to upset me. I’ve never been keen on video games, a perhaps unwarranted prejudice. (Brandon Sanderson says they can be art, so I’m willing to reconsider.) Setting that aside, though—we have a professor who’s trying to counter the relentless encroachment of tech in the classroom by, presumably, banning electronic devices. This deeply vexes a student, who complains that she can no longer play video games on her laptop during lectures. Worse, the replies to Porter’s post are full of folks rallying to the defense of the student, arguing that perhaps she has ADHD and needs video games in order to focus. (The way the post is worded, it sounds like she uses the games to avoid listening—a brazen thing to tell your professor!)

It’s not enough that students spend seven to eight hours a day outside of class on their devices, which would seem to leave them little time for anything but sleep. Over the past decade those devices have infiltrated the classroom. My high school English teacher, who but recently retired, tells me that prior to the recent Texas phone ban her students no longer spoke to each other. “Kids used to talk in the halls,” she said. “Now there’s an eerie silence. Everyone is on their phones.” (When I posted about Porter’s video game-playing student, someone replied, “You should be able to play on your phone in class after the teacher is done,” as though books don’t exist.) Even worse, as screens have become ever more ubiquitous and addictive—average screentime for toddlers doubled between 1997 and 2014—teachers feel pressured to make their lessons more entertaining, and over time the quality of those lessons diminishes. A growing number of instructors, even at elite universities, are lowering the number of books they teach per semester or assigning easier texts. In the battle between learning and screens, the screens always seem to win.

I don’t actually think the root issue is phones; if you could wave a wand and make it magically 2007, it still would not solve the underlying problem, which is that we, as a society, are hopelessly addicted to entertainment. Because we fear death, because we are the most death-averse culture that has ever existed, we have built a world of perpetual noise and stimulation to avoid the unwelcome truths that irrupt in the silence of thought. As Neil Postman warned decades ago in books like Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death, the incentive structures of screen media reward amusement over knowledge, which is why the few cable channels that were initially devoted to learning now largely broadcast rubbish about aliens; which is why educational YouTube channels like Books and Things get thousands of views while channels where people are slimed or objects are crushed by a hydraulic press get tens of millions; which is why young Johnny is watching this on his phone while his teacher tries to tell him about the Civil War:

America’s greatest addiction isn’t oil, it’s entertainment. And in this Lotus-Eater land in which we live, this pleasure island, this land of infinite amusements, screen media grows aggressively dumber over time, with effects that ripple outward to religion, education, politics and all aspects of life. Eric Levitz recently argued that culture war issues began to overwhelm political discourse with the advent of cable news channels competing with one another for the attention of viewers. In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, TV was dominated by three channels. As he puts it, “Amid such scant competition, the major networks didn’t worry too much about maximizing the entertainment value of their news broadcasts.” But in the late 1990s, realizing that they now had to compete with dozens of other channels, cable news began a race to the bottom, pivoting from sober reporting on economics to red-meat issues designed to galvanize the emotions of their viewing audiences (“caviar to the general,” as Hamlet called it). Our demand for constant amusement swallowed politics whole. And, well, you need only look around you to see where that’s led us.

Neil Postman saw where this was heading. In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), he wrote that our cultural fixation on avoiding the dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 had blinded us to all the ways in which we were becoming the society prophesied in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The regimes of the future, he wrote, enforce conformity not through brutality but through pleasure:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance ... As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions’ ... In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

As someone said yesterday, if you lack the attention span to sit down and read a book for even an hour, you’ve ceased in any meaningful way to be free. We have long since ceased to be free.

Friends, the reason blogging was a bit lighter than usual in the first half of last month is because I was doing research for what became a 2,000-word essay on the feast day of Candlemas, which is today. Plough Quarterly graciously agreed to host the piece, which went up this morning and contains all manner of exuberant nerdery on the history, lore and superstitions of the holiday. It’s one of the pieces I’m most proud of.

An excerpt:

In the west of England, Ralph Whitlock tells us, Candlemas was deemed the best day in the year for planting peas and beans. A contributor to Notes & Queries, writing in 1855, claimed to have met “an old shepherd named Balderstone” on a “foggy Candlemas” who told him, “On Candlemas Day, if the thorns hang a-drop / Then you are sure of a good pea crop”—“and certainly,” adds the writer, “the pea crop that year was remarkably good…”

There were other superstitions. With the Christmas season formally ending, neglecting to remove decorations by Candlemas risked inviting family misfortune or even the devil, who would obligingly take down any greenery that had been left up. In “Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve,” the seventeenth-century English poet Robert Herrick urged:

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherein ye dressed the Christmas hall—

The poem ends with a warning: maids who are slothful in their cleaning duties will be troubled by goblins, proportionate to their neglect.

You can read the full essay here. Happy Candlemas.

Friends. Tonight I would like to share with you the playlist that has been the soundtrack to this whole year.

I’ve been a fan of authentic medieval music since high school, when my best friend took me to a record shop in Houston and bought us both a copy of Salva Nos, a Yule-themed album by beloved English band Mediaeval Baebes. Over the past couple years, for reasons I can’t entirely fathom, I find myself gravitating towards increasingly strange and obscure music: a bit of Bach, a bit of Broadcast, the BBC Radiophonics Workshop, the Valerie and Her Week of Wonders soundtrack… and of course, the Baebes. I’ve written before about my love of “The Lyke-Wake Dirge,” a haunting Yorkshire ballad about the soul’s journey from this world to the world to come.

So you can imagine my joy and surprise when, on the final day of last year, I discovered that someone on Spotify had made an eighty-five hour “Yule, Medieval Christmas, Tudor Christmas” playlist.

Now, a normal person might have thought, “Hmmm, today is the final day of the year. Perhaps I should be listening to something other than an eighty-five hour medieval and Tudor Yule playlist.” But of course I, being me, said, “I’m going to play this nonstop for the next TWELVE MONTHS.” And I have!

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is my favorite playlist anyone has ever made. I’m not sure how to contact the Spotify user, lwestenra, who made it, so if you know this person, please thank her for me. All the medieval and Tudor carols you could possibly want are here. There are albums with titles like Sing We Now of Christmas, Music for a Tudor Feast and A Tapestry of Carols. You will find songs performed by Oxford and Cambridge choirs, the Maddy Pryor Band, and the Trouvere Medieval Minsters. And yes, you will find Salva Nos.

May this be the soundtrack for your advent. And lastly, a heartwarming thing: in the past year I’ve refrained from sharing this playlist with anyone except my immediate family, not only because the Christmas season had passed but because I felt there could not possibly be general interest in it — a rather discouraging thought. Yesterday I reluctantly shared the link on twitter and the response was frankly shocking: hundreds of shares, dozens of enthusiastic replies. Over 1,500 people subscribed to the playlist in the hours after I shared it. It turns out, folk are hungry for traditional music. There is still some good in this world. Happy Christmas.

Harry Potter came along at precisely the right moment in my life.

It was the autumn of 2005 and I was eighteen, a sophomore in college. Away from home for the first time, I found the world opening up to me in new and exciting ways. The Killers were on the radio, playing songs that were considerably darker and more hypnotic than the Christian contemporary music to which I’d grown up listening. I was learning just how extensive an education could be acquired from wandering at random through the school’s 300,000-volume library and reading whatever struck my fancy. That semester I picked up an unabridged Thousand and One Nights for the first time and fell in love. A diary from that era records how I brought The Pickwick Papers home during the Christmas holidays and stayed up reading until nearly dawn on three consecutive nights—leading my mother to accuse me of “sleeping your life away.” On the contrary, I had never felt more alive.

And, early in the summer, a friend had nudged me to read Harry Potter.

Somehow I had entirely missed out on this publishing phenomenon. Maybe I worried that the books would turn me into a witch, though it’s more likely I harbored a snobbish disdain for things I perceived as being excessively popular. (A teacher in the seventh grade had forced me to read several bad YA books because she felt my devotion to Dickens was holding me back socially.) Whenever friends brought up Harry Potter in conversation, I would try to steer them towards the supernatural thrillers of forgotten Inkling Charles Williams. I was annoying, in other words, and—I’m afraid Mrs. Didier was right about this—badly out of touch with popular culture. Every teen should have at least one experience of falling in love with a contemporary piece of media that’s also beloved by his or her peers. Looking back, I think this is good and healthy.

But before 2005—before “Mr. Brightside,” before Hogwarts—it had never happened to me. I was born old and had to grow young.

And then on the last day of freshman year, in the midst of some rather nasty drama that I don’t care to remember, Allison Worley said to me, “You need to read Harry Potter, because this is just like the ending of those books.” She explained how each book portrays a single academic year and how each school year ends in explosive fashion. Sufficiently intrigued, during the first week of summer break I ran by the library and grabbed the first couple books.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the accusations of promoting witchcraft were either ill-informed or malicious. I had read widely enough in the English literary canon to appreciate what Rowling was attempting, and could see that the books—even the earlier ones, which often get dinged for being slapdash and childish—were a gleeful postmodern pastiche of all the books their author had loved: Edith Nesbit and Roald Dahl and the Narnia series and yes, the novels of Charles Dickens. (This is not an endorsement of Rowling’s personal behavior which has been, to say the least, disappointing.) I was struck by something John Leonard wrote in the New York Times Book Review, how she had “looted the shelves of literature and mythology, fairy tales and folklore, anthropology and comparative religion, firing up a pop-culture crockpot and adding pratfalls, wordplay and dread.” Before I read those words, I’m not sure it had occurred to me that one could do such a thing; but she had done it. The Dementors were rather transparently cribbed from The Lord of the Rings and A Christmas Carol, Hagrid read like a slightly more bumbling Ghost of Christmas Present, Snape had the self-loathing of Sydney Carton (it would be another two years before I learned that she had also given him Carton’s redemptive arc) and the mystery plotting was constructed with all the intricacy of a Hercule Poirot novel. When Harry tricks Ron into playing Quidditch with confidence in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which came out that summer) by pretending to slip him an illegal bottle of a good luck potion, I felt certain she had repurposed a traditional fairy-tale motif for her own narrative purposes. I began to suspect that she had done so in many other places in this and the previous books.

Having discerned their hidden veneer of sophistication, I didn’t feel guilty for enjoying the books. Like many of their readers, I read about Hogwarts (probably the series’ best achievement) with a mixture of vicarious joy and envy. I yearned to roam about the castle, skipping over the trick stairs, quarreling with Sir Cadogan and the Fat Lady, gazing from the tower windows onto the frosted grounds and the moonlit lake. In the later books, especially, Hogwarts becomes such a tangible place: you can almost feel the chill air seeping through the stone walls as Harry makes his way to detention, footfalls echoing in the corridors. Dickens, early in his career, wrote that a really great story must mingle comedy with drama in what he called “streaky bacon.” A balance must be struck. I’d argue that, along with their whodunit structure, what makes the books so aggressively readable is precisely this tonal mixture, this effortless juggling of joy and tension. In one scene, Harry and Ron will bicker adorably over the best approach to inviting a girl to the Yule Ball. A few scenes later, Harry will be trapped on the stairs beneath an Invisibility Cloak, seen only by Mad-Eye Moody, while Snape hovers vulture-like mere inches away. In both scenes, somehow, the stakes seem to be life and death.

Recently, after avoiding it for several years, I watched the film version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in celebration of its twentieth anniversary. Before it began I tried explaining to Rach the context in which it premiered, and how it became my favorite film in the series (beating out even the more critically lauded Prisoner of Azkaban). In my second year of college I acquired a circle of friends, mostly women, who were devoted Potter fans. We dressed in costumes, carved pumpkins on the lawn on bleak October afternoons and marathoned the previous films in the series, none of which had quite attained the greatness of, say, the Lord of the Rings films. When we learned that the fourth film was scheduled for release in November, we bought group tickets to the midnight premiere with an air of immense trepidation and excitement. It was rumored that this would be the darkest film yet—necessarily so, given the events at the end of the book—perhaps bringing to the series a maturity and gravitas that had so far proven elusive. I read a promising interview in which Mike Newell, the director, said he intended the film to play like a classic British murder mystery—making him the first director to understand that at heart these are not fantasy, but mystery stories. “You have to come with us to see this film,” I told my best friend (not a Harry Potter fan). “These movies aren’t for kids anymore.”

Given the level of my anticipation, I don’t suppose even a perfect movie would have met my expectations. And Goblet of Fire was not a perfect movie, but something about it resonated with me in a unique and inexplicable way. I once read a blog post by novelist Maggie Stiefvater in which she recalled seeing the binary sun scene in Star Wars at the age of nine and deciding she had to become a writer. Sometimes we encounter the right film at the right moment. This was that film for me. The coming-of-age elements—the often quite serious quarrels, the social humiliations, Harry’s first fumbling attempts to engage the opposite sex—landed powerfully at the end of a semester in which I had experienced all these things, many of them for the first time. The ending devastated me. During each of the three screenings I attended, I wept without fail at the scene in which—drawing from a famous moment in Homer’s Iliad—Harry brings Cedric’s dead body back to Hogwarts, revealing to the assembled crowd, and Cedric’s father, that Cedric has been murdered by Voldemort. (I’m afraid I could never see Jeff Rawle as Amos Diggory screaming, “That’s my son! My boy!” without completely losing it. I have trouble even thinking about it without tearing up.)

For a number of reasons I’ve distanced myself from Harry Potter over the past decade. But given my intense emotional reaction to the film, I was curious to see if it still resonated twenty years later with the benefit of maturity and a more discerning critical perspective. Having now seen Fanny and Alexander, Boyhood and Better Call Saul, would I retain the ability to be moved by what is, ultimately, a movie for children?

Watching it now, I’m better able to see the movie’s flaws. There are, as my sister is fond of pointing out, some rather ropey special effects during the underwater sequence. There’s slightly too much of Mad-Eye Moody—a character who was ill-served by the subsequent books—and not enough of David Tennant’s Barty Crouch, Jr., who steals the film with roughly two minutes of screen time. Visually, Goblet of Fire lacks the lyricism of Alfonso Cuaron’s Azkaban. In places the cinematography is merely adequate, recalling the graceless direction of the first film and its sequel.

But I think the film’s biggest failing was feeling obliged to pander to its core audience of book-readers by retaining moments that could easily have been excised in service of a tighter, more focused story. The result, as with Rita Skeeter and Moaning Myrtle, is scenes of forced comedy that stall the movie whenever it threatens to gain momentum, as a result of which it lurches ahead in fits and starts and never achieves real velocity until the final three-quarters of an hour (when the mystery elements come to the fore and the humor has largely vanished). One suspects the filmmakers were torn between the desire for cinematic artistry and the demands of a corporate product, with the latter too often winning out. They had the good sense to remove any mention of house-elves, but having done that, it’s as though they lost their nerve. If Newell and his scribe, Steve Kloves, had pruned ruthlessly, like Cuaron in the previous film and David Yates in the next, I think this film might be more critically beloved than it is. Instead, it stabs at greatness and only sporadically reaches it.

All of this crossed my mind during the first hour or so of our recent viewing. And yet as the film kept going, it began to win me over. My chief complaint about many of the past decade’s highest-grossing films is that they feel empty and soulless, entirely lacking in substance, as though no humans were involved in their production. Goblet of Fire is not a soulless film. Despite the demands of being the fourth film in a lumbering cultural juggernaut, humanity keeps creeping in at the edges—in the image of rain pouring down a stained-glass window, in the scene where a euphoric Neville enters the boys’ dorm after dancing for much of the night with Ginny, in the unsettling exchange between Barty Crouch and Harry mere moments before Barty’s death (“Tragic, of course, to lose one’s family. Never whole again, are we?”). It’s not perfect, but seen from the vantage of 2025, even its raggedy imperfections now work to its advantage. One thinks of the recent interview in which Emma Watson said she found the experience of acting in adulthood crushing because her years on the set of Harry Potter had led her to believe that “the people I worked with were going to be my family and that we were going to be lifelong friends.” And watching the movie, you sense that it was made with enormous care, and by people who believed in what they were doing, and who wanted to make an excellent film.

And they largely succeeded. The film never skimps on character. Harry’s companions are here given some of their best material in the series. The flash of Ron’s eyes when Harry’s name is retrieved from the titular Goblet should have dispelled the notion that Rupert Grint is solely a comic actor. Hermione’s protective anxiety towards Harry—during the bridge scene, especially—is believable and moving. That stretch of the film between the second and third tasks, from when Harry discovers Crouch’s body to his row with Snape in the Potions closet—the scenes that convinced me, at the age of eighteen, to become a mystery writer—have the air of a Masterpiece Mystery. For a brief moment, you feel as though you’re watching an episode of Endeavour.

By then, of course, I was wholly won over. And when Harry returned from the graveyard clutching Cedric’s body, when Fleur screamed and the horror of what had just taken place rippled through the disbelieving crowd, I sobbed harder than ever.

My continuing attachment to this movie has left me slightly mystified. I think part of it must be that it imprinted on me at a formative time in my life, one that I now remember with great fondness in spite of my incurable awkwardness. But there’s something else, too. I don’t suppose I had ever felt so much a part of my own generation, that we were all sharing in a communal experience of joy. The Harry Potter series combined so many things I already loved—fairy-tales and folklore, Dickensian storytelling, British culture—things I had always felt alone in enjoying as a young person growing up in southern Texas in the 2000s. Now those very things were being loved and celebrated by people my own age, a great many people. That sense of belonging is one I’ve been chasing ever since.

And lately it feels further away than ever. Britain seems to have vanished once again from American youth culture. A few weeks back I read an alarming report that some babies in the U. K., their brains addled by Netflix and TikTok, are now growing up with American accents. Sometimes Americanization feels like a dark cloud threatening to devour the world. As an Anglophile I welcome any media that pushes back against the relentless tide, whether it be Branagh’s Henry V or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I understand why many have now disavowed Harry Potter or find the whole spectacle sort of embarrassing. But there was a period in our youths when American kids were saying “mate” and “blimey,” when they queued up by the millions to read real books, when they dreamed of falling asleep in the tower of a Scottish castle. And that, I think, is worth celebrating.

Last week I witnessed something profoundly disturbing.

“Evil” is really the only word sufficient. I think the emerging backlash against the use of AI in the creative arts has been slow to develop because, while it unsettled many of us on an instinctive level, we’re no longer accustomed to speaking in moral categories. We’ll say a thing made us uneasy, that it risks perpetuating oppression against marginalized groups and so forth—but the language of good and evil strikes us as a bit too religious, a bit too redolent of snake-handlers in backwater churches.

But then you see something that is demonstrably, nauseatingly evil.

Case in point: a viral video by 2wai, the “avatar social network,” posted to Twitter on November 11. In the video, a pregnant young woman chats via phone with a genial but sassy old lady with thatched hair whom we assume to be the woman’s living mother. Over the course of the next two minutes, the woman gives birth and we watch as her son matures from a child to a teenager. As he ages, he continues to converse with the old lady in the phone, a woman who, unnervingly, never seems to get any older.

“How was school today?” she asks as he walks home, aged ten.

“It was really cool,” he says. “I made this crazy shot in basketball—”

Gran cuts him off. “I don’t really care that much about basketball. What about the crush?”

The video then skips ahead twenty years. We see the young man, now thirty, holding up an ultrasound picture while the old lady, still wearing the same clothes, cries out in joy and disbelief.

Then comes the twist. In a flashback, we learn that Gran has been dead all along, and that her daughter and grandson have, for three decades, been chatting with a digital avatar made in her image. Prior to her death she spent three minutes taking footage of herself which she then uploaded to 2wai; this footage was then used to create a perfect replica of Gran, one that resembled her and spoke in her voice.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but in case you read the above description or saw the video and were tempted to download 2wai: do NOT, under any circumstances, use the digital necromancy app. The thing in the phone may look like your grandmother; it may wear her skin like a suit, but that is not your grandmother. And if your grandmother is dead, I’m sorry, but there’s no bringing her back.

I’ve mentioned before how philosopher Erik Voegelin said the Book of Genesis contains the two oldest truths in the world: one, that all living things are mortal, finite; and two, that the mystery of existence is impenetrable. Abominations like the aforementioned app violate both of these core truths. They operate under the false assumption that the fullness of a person’s existence can be captured, and uploaded to the cloud, in just a few minutes. And they teach that in so doing, they can banish humanity’s most durable foe, death. You thought your Aunt Lisa died and was buried, but no—there she is, in your phone, asking about your tuna casserole. You no longer need to grieve, because she is with you always (assuming that Cloudflare stays running, and you don’t cancel your subscription, in which case—farewell, Lisa!).

Look: there’s a reason religions and mythologies have spent millennia warning us against contact with the dead. Scholars are divided over the question of whether the Witch of Endor in the First Book of Samuel was a charlatan or a genuine medium, but the story leaves no doubt that attempting to summon the dead is misguided, at best. On the rare occasions in folklore when a living person manages to bridge the chasm between the dead and the living—as in the Flemish tale “The Mermaid”—they’re either prevented from speaking to the souls of the departed, or they communicate and later come to regret it.

We need a strong moral taboo against attempting to conjure the dead using technology. I see people online calling the 2wai video “demonic.” I don’t know about that (though it’s worth noting that in the Book of Revelation, the Beast, a figure traditionally linked with the Antichrist, causes an image to both come alive and speak). Personally, I think the real danger of an app like this is that you will never have to confront death. You will never experience the friction of losing a loved one and being transformed by that experience. You will lose an essential piece of yourself. You will never become the person you could have been.

I think Edna St. Vincent Millay showed the better approach to death in her poem “Dirge without Music:”

“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

“The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

“No spell can re-awaken the dead,” says Dumbledore to Harry, near the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The dark wizards of Silicon Valley may succeed in capturing a shade, a flicker, of the departed. But the best is lost.

“Could you be a great London writer without being a great London walker, I wonder?”

~John Rogers

For those who have been reading our “Monthly Miscellany” posts, you might have noticed our frequent mention of a certain John Rogers. His YouTube channel has become our comfort go-to evening show. Of course, Boze and Rach have long been enamoured with London’s unbelievably rich history, especially as told by that most lyrical of London biographers, Peter Ackroyd. Rach has four 1860s London maps on her sewing room wall, gifted her by Boze. Still, however, we don’t have the means to travel frequently. Is it a little unusual, then, that two urchins of southern Oregon, USA, should find their nightly comfort viewing in watching a very amiable gent tramping around London? Some weeks ago, when Rachel had had a particularly difficult time getting to sleep—or staying asleep, once there—we realized later that we had missed our usual evening routine of watching a John Rogers walking video. We realized recently that, although we became acquainted with his videos a couple of years ago, it has been a nightly routine since late-March of 2024.

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We even have a mental “John Rogers Bingo”—which we’ve started to make tangible in a Word document—where we mentally check off some of our favorite Rogers tropes, themes, phrases: lost rivers, a mention of Iain Sinclair, a pint at a pub at the end of a walk, Chris Haugen’s “Fresh Fallen Snow” playing in the background, a mention of the historic significance and sacredness of the confluence of two rivers, and, in the free space in the middle, the final line from nearly every walk: “I look forward to seeing you on the next walk…wherever that may be.” And many more.

John Rogers is far more than a “very amiable gent.” Host of the YouTube channel John Rogers Walks (also on Patreon) and blogger on The Lost Byway, he is author of several books that outline some of his most notable journeys: This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City and Welcome to New London: Journeys and Encounters in the Post-Olympic City. He’s not only the kind of fellow you’d love to be good mates with, chatting over a good pint at some “fantastic boozer,” but he’s always great fun to watch and listen to. He’s a delightful historian and detective of London, an on-foot chronicler of her buildings and developments, her churches, her rivers—both her visible rivers and the mysteries of her many “lost” rivers buried below London’s modern streets. Much like our beloved Peter Ackroyd, he is a psychogeographer who has introduced us to words like “hauntology” as he tries to come to grips with the essence of a place based on her history, environment, the people that have haunted her steps.

Some of our favorite walks of his, however, aren’t even in London. Rogers also goes occasionally not only to the outer reaches of London, but far beyond. To Essex. To Suffolk. To Oxford. Even, occasionally, abroad.

Sometime late last year, John Rogers announced his hope to do a “Dickens walk” in 2025. We were stunned, excited, thrilled. Here was to be the convergence of two of our favorite things: John Rogers walking, and Charles Dickens. (Dickens, of course, was a great London walker, perhaps the greatest. Read his marvelous “Night Walks” essay, or his adventures “On Duty with Inspector Field” from Reprinted Pieces, about hanging out with the detective that inspired Mr. Bucket in Bleak House.) The sheer anticipation of a video like this has been an ongoing subject of conversation this past year, so you can imagine how excited we were last Sunday to find that he had done it—and, of course, done it beautifully.

We wanted to share our excitement with you, and use this particular video as a way of introducing you to the marvelous work of John Rogers.

Rogers’s route begins with what he calls the “origin story of Dickens,” in Southwark. Starting in Great Suffolk Street, through streets with the names of “Weller,” “Little Dorrit Court,” and many more, he visits the final remaining wall of the Marshalsea Prison, where he quotes from Little Dorrit. The “inciting incident” of Dickens’s story, Rogers argues, was the imprisonment of John Dickens in the Marshalsea Prison for debtors; meanwhile, the twelve-year-old Dickens lived on his own in lodgings, working long days at the nearby blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs and trying to support his impoverished family.

Here, we know that Dickens felt a deep humiliation, his hopes and dreams for a good education and for being a gentleman—here, we hear echoes both of David Copperfield’s own journey, and of Pip’s ambition—seem suddenly dashed. Rogers considers the sense of “injustice” that “burned brightly” in Dickens all of his life, especially for the plight of children and the poor. Rogers mentioned that, even after his father’s term in the Marshalsea had finished, Dickens “never forgave” his mother for wanting the boy to continue working at the blacking factory.

Utilizing the Penguin collection of extracts about Dickens and London, Rogers journeys through places associated with Little Dorrit and The Pickwick Papers, recalling Dickens’s marvelous quotes about the rambling old inns of pre-Victorian London (right before we meet Sam Weller at the White Hart):

In the Borough especially, there still remain some half-dozen old inns, which have preserved their external features unchanged, and which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments of private speculation. Great, rambling queer old places they are, with galleries, and passages, and staircases,
wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any, and that the world should exist long enough to exhaust the innumerable veracious legends connected with old London Bridge, and its adjacent neighbourhood on the Surrey side.”

~The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 10

We see St. George the Martyr church where Little Dorrit was baptized and later married. He walks to London Bridge, recalling such Dickensian scenes as the conversation between Nancy and Mr. Brownlow, overheard by Noah Claypole, which leads to her gruesome death. We visit the Guildhall, with its figures of Gog and Magog, which are referenced in Master Humphrey’s Clock and his short piece, “Gone Astray.”

Although Rogers usually prefers to end a walk before nightfall or right at dusk, as filming is challenging in the darkness and we can’t see much of the landscape, he wisely and purposefully goes into darkness as he nears the City of London towards the end of the walk, including the area of Fagin’s den (Saffron Hill) and Bleeding Heart Yard.

Rogers acknowledges that there are so many Dickens associations in London that it is impossible to cover even a good portion of them. Dickens defines, for many of us, the essence of Victorian London. But the route Rogers chooses to focus on really gets at the heart of Dickens’s own personal trajectory and some of his most notable and familiar London fictional scenes. And, appropriately, he ends the walk at the wonderful Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street.

This walk was, as John Rogers said, “the story of London’s greatest ever storyteller….and if Dickens isn’t London’s greatest ever storyteller, who is?”

We’ll end here with Rogers’s beautiful summation of the Dickens that we all know and love:

“He [Dickens] never forgot where he came from. He never forgot the hardships he suffered. And it seems like he dedicated his life’s work to highlighting children—the struggles of children, the hardships of children. Humanizing them in a way that I’m sure was key to some of the social reform that took place in the Victorian period. You could argue, alongside Shakespeare, that he’s the most important writer in the English language. That’s a bold claim to make, but his stories are still read and still loved to this very day because at their heart they’re full of love and humanity.”

Happy November, friends! I am popping in quickly to share another learning project—quite different—in case it is of interest. Alongside our Great Books Challenge, I’ll be embarking on an approximately two-year personal journey through classical music history, using David Ewen’s The Complete Book of Classical Music as the basic textbook reference, as well as other recommendations from musicians and music lovers who are journeying along.

Here’s my introductory post to this addition to my personal curricula.

I’m hosting this over at Don Carlo & the Seamstress, as it is such a different genre of project. If you’re already a paid subscriber here at Biblioll College I don’t want you to have to pay twice, so message me here on Substack to let me know of your interest and I’ll add you as a complimentary subscription to Don Carlo & the Seamstress.

Happy listening, friends!

“October is regarded as a month of mystery. The last night of this month, the Eve of All Saints, called in Welsh ‘Nos Cyn Calan gauaf’ [Nos Galan Gaeaf], the first night of winter, is one of the ‘three spirit nights’ when quaint old customs are prevalent.” —Marie Trevelyan, Folklore and Folk Stories of Wales

As some of you know, I’m a creature of mist, rain and cold weather. I’ve been reliably informed that this makes me a heathen, but I don’t care. I only really come alive each year during the -ber months; my spirit goes into hibernation in early March and doesn’t emerge again until it grows chilly in mid-August. In October the soon-waning year reaches a shining peak of perfection. We are entering the season, in Ray Bradbury’s words, of “cold tidal waves of strange rain” and “twilight-in-mid-morning holy hours,” of pumpkins in windows and jugs of cider, of carnivals, calliopes and costumed children. If there’s any magic still to be found in the world, it resides in autumn.

As I did with my Michaelmas post on Monday, I want to celebrate the beginning of this month by exploring some of the rituals, festivals, lore and customs that make it unique. It’s a time of year that seems to have excited the imaginations of our forebears much as it does ours, and there’s much joy to be gleaned from poring through old books seeking their vanishing footsteps in the snows of the past.

The above lines are from the Menologium, an Anglo-Saxon poem describing the calendar year. It is from this poem that we’ve acquired much of what we know about how English people in the early Middle Ages perceived themselves in relation to time. In the contemporary translation of Craig Williamson, it reads:

“After three days’ time,
The tenth month October rides in town,
Bringing abundance and the beginning of winter,
As the year winds down. Men and women
All over the island, Angles and Saxons,
Know this month. Then we patiently wait
Twenty-seven days to October 28th,
When we celebrate the mass for two together,
Simon and Jude, those warrior-apostles.
We’ve learned that they were dear to our Lord-
They won great glory in their blessed ascension.”

As the poem states and as Eleanor Parker observes in her book Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year, the month was originally known as Winterfylleð, but the name “soon fell out of use.” Curiously for us, because the Anglo-Saxons lacked a concept of autumn, early October was the start of the winter season. It was now that the world became colder, the days darker. With harvest ended, people spent more time indoors, seeking ways to stay warm.

Now let’s look day-by-day at some of the traditional holidays and festivals of Wales, England and Scotland. Some of these you aren’t going to believe; I can scarce believe them myself.

Old Man’s Day, on October 2nd, commemorates the day (in 1571) when Matthew Wall, presumed to be dead and on his way to burial, was abruptly jolted awake when one of his pallbearers stumbled, upsetting the coffin in which he lay. Wall married within the year, and when he truly died, in 1595, left instructions in his will that church bells be rung on this date every year in Braughing, Hertfordshire. He also bequeathed one pound annually for the care of twenty poor children and ten elderly. Each year on this day, Steve Roud tells us in The English Year, “children of the village gather with brooms and enthusiastically sweep Fleece Lane, while the funeral bell tolls. Brambles are placed on Matthew’s grave, to keep the sheep off.”

There is a goose fair at Nottingham on the first Wednesday in October and another goose fair in Tavistock on the second Wednesday. October 7th is the date of the Twyford Bellringer’s Feast, which sounds rather like an event that would take place in Midsomer County. According to the Sutton Companion, this event commemorates the night in 1754 when William Davis, riding alone in the dark, came within inches of falling over a cliff to his death. He would have done so had he not suddenly heard the sound of church bells, which alerted him that he was heading in the wrong direction.

Those who are enamored of London’s vibrant maritime life (there are a few of us) will be pleased to know that the Harvest of the Sea Festival takes place on the second Sunday of October at St Mary-at-Hill Church in London near Billingsgate, just outside of the old fish market. The author of the Traditional Customs & Ceremonies blog writes, “I remember as a child once being brought early in the morning to see this vibrant fish market in action. The seafood smells, the sounds and sights of the white coated porters rushing around delivering their valuable fish stock was heady and confusing.” It sounds frankly splendid.

At the Church of St Katharine Cree on the sixteenth a sermon is read every year known as the Lion’s Sermon. It has been preached, Christina Hole writes in her book English Custom and Usage, every year for over three hundred years:

“It commemorates Sir John Gayer’s escape from lions during one of his trading expeditions. Becoming separated from his companions, he suddenly found himself confronted by lions and, in his extremity, said the prayer of Daniel. The lions turned away, leaving him unharmed, and he lived to be twice Lord Mayor of London, in 1646 and 1647, and to suffer imprisonment for his devotion to Charles I.”

When he died in 1711, Gayer left instructions in his will that a sermon was to be read every year commemorating the event of his escape.

Two days later (October 18th) comes St Luke’s Day, which in bygone days was accompanied by a bawdy fair. In medieval iconography St Luke is often depicted alongside a horned ox, and in the Middle Ages, as Roud so delicately puts it, “people found the wearing of horns immensely amusing because of their sexual connotations.” Thus St Luke’s Fair became the occasion for all manner of frivolity. Crowds numbering in the hundreds wore horns on this day, horns symbolizing cuckoldry. Men dressed as women and women as men. Unmarried girls were encouraged to employ divination rituals for the sake of discerning their husbands-to-be. Daniel Defoe described the fair as “the yearly collected rabble of mad-people,” and few among the well-heeled mourned when the fair was shut down in 1871.

Even more esoteric and delightful is the Egremont Crab-Apple Fair, taking place on the Saturday nearest the eighteenth. The Dictionary of English Folklore describes it as “a series of events rather than a continuous fair,” featuring a famed pipe-smoking contest and a competition to see who can scale a greasy pole and claim the prize at the top. In days of old the prize was one-half of a sheep’s carcass, but today the winner must settle for a one-pound note. Charles Kightly tells us, in Customs and Ceremonies, that the fair takes its name from the annual distribution of apples by a lorry that drives round the village at around noon. “In recent years ordinary eating apples have been thrown to the crowd, but formerly wild crabs were distributed: and since these are still particularly hard, sharp-tasting and generally unpalatable in October, they were more often employed as ammunition in a free-for-all apple fight than eaten.”

“On or about October 20,” say the authors of Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, “the 400-year-old Oyster Fair takes place. This commemorates the granting by Richard I of the River Colne oyster-fishing rights to the town.” The following day, Trafalgar Day, memorializes Lord Nelson’s victory over the Spaniards and French at the pivotal Battle of Trafalgar. (Nelson himself died shortly before the battle’s end.) Two days later, in Bristol, parishioners of the Mary Redcliffe Church make the Redcliffe Pipe Walk to celebrate the gift of a water pipe bestowed by Robert de Berkeley in 1190. De Berkeley is now buried on the church grounds, and locals honor his legacy by walking the length of the pipe once a year.

October 23rd is also the anniversary of the Battle of Edge Hill in Cornwall, which Katharine Briggs and other folklorists inform us is observed annually by the actual ghosts who fought in the battle. Also in Cornwall on the twenty-fifth is the Ovingham Fair, which, Christina Hole writes, was in former times followed by “Gwonny Jokesane’s Day, when a mayor was chosen and carried about in a disorderly procession. Who or what Gwonny Jokesane was is not known.”

October 25th, as many of you are no doubt aware, is the feast day of Crispin and Crispinian, two brothers beheaded in 286 under Diocletian, but known to us today primarily through a speech Shakespeare places in the mouth of King Henry V on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt (which happened to coincide with St Crispin’s Day), and which a young Kenneth Branagh made into probably the most soul-stirring moment in any film ever.

According to Notes & Queries (1852), St Crispin’s Day was still locally celebrated “with much rejoicing. The boys go round asking for money in the name of St. Crispin, bonfires are lighted, and it passes off very much in the same way as the fifth of November does.” Those who refused to partake in the celebrations were deemed unlucky, as suggested by this Herefordshire rhyme:

“The twenty-fifth of October,
Cursed be the cobbler
Who goes to bed sober!”

Jacqueline Simpson, in Folklore of Sussex, quotes a similar rhyme “current in Brighton in 1822”:

“If ever I St Crispin’s Day forget,
O, may my feet be never free from wet,
But every dirty street and lane pass through
Without one bit of sole to either shoe!”

Burstow’s Reminiscences (quoted by Simpson) states that in Horsham this was a time for hanging up effigies of villagers who were particularly disliked.

As noted above in the Menologium, October 28th is the feast day of Saints Simon and Jude. Before it was subsumed by Hallowe’en, Somerset in late October celebrated Punkie Night, when children marched round out-of-doors singing the Punkie Night anthem and clutching mangold-wurzels whose insides had been scooped out. A lighted candle was placed within, in the manner of a jack-o’-lantern. Kingsley Palmer writes, in The Folklore of Somerset:

“The custom originated when the menfolk [of Hinton St George] visited Chiselborough fair, which used to be held on 29 October, and having drunk too much cider were unable to find their way home. The women scooped out mangolds which were growing in the fields and, placing candles inside them, went out to guide their recalcitrant husbands home.”

Christina Hole adds that the children begged for candles, and bad luck followed anyone who refused their request. It’s speculated by some folklorists that the modern observance of Hallowe’en emerged from the rituals of Punkie Night—but as Hallowe’en (and All Saints’) deserves a post of its own, that is a subject for another time.

It seems only fitting that as we began this post with Ray Bradbury, we should end with him as well. Bradbury, the poet laureate of autumn, spoke of the October Country, “that country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts … who passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain, for whom fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.” Like him, like Anne Shirley, I wish it would be this season, this weather, all year round. If there’s a next world, perhaps our Octobers are just shadows of something to come that at present we glimpse only briefly, in flickers. Perhaps heaven isn’t an eternal summer, but an eternal autumn.

Today is the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel in the liturgical calendar, more commonly known as Michaelmas. As anyone who lives with me can attest, I have been terribly excited about this holiday. I’ve spent much of the past week running through our house, from room to room, upstairs and down, crying, “It’s nearly Michaelmas! Where shall we find a goose for St. Michael’s Day?”

We were unable to procure a goose, alas, but that hasn’t prevented me from being festive. Over the weekend I raided the “folklore & customs” section of my personal library in the hopes of learning everything worth knowing about Michaelmas: its roots in the Middle Ages, the history of its celebration in England, strange local customs and superstitions that became attached to the holiday. And I wanted to share what I’ve learned, because there’s been much angst and confusion of late from Americans on social media over a passing mention of Michaelmas Term in the first line of Bleak House. I’ve even seen people say Bleak House is impossible to read because they’ve never heard of Michaelmas, as if this one cultural reference invalidates the whole novel. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to these people that they could simply look up unfamiliar things. And now they can read this post.

We begin with the Anglo-Saxons. Eleanor Parker, in her indispensable book Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year, writes that St. Michael was highly venerated in the early Middle Ages and held many roles. In medieval Christian lore he was given the task of guiding the newly dead, Charon-like, into the next world. In the Scottish Highlands, Ralph Whitlock tells us, he was the patron saint of the sea. Based on the scant information we’re given about him in scripture, he came to symbolize the struggle between good and evil, and was often visually depicted battling a great dragon, the devil. (“And there was war in heaven,” the Book of Revelation tells us: “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.”) The Anglo-Saxons called his feast day—which took place in the second week of October in the old calendar—Michaeles maesse. And it was, says Parker, “a high point in the church year.”

In England Michaelmas was one of the four Quarter Days, the others being Lady Day (March 25), Midsummer (or the feast day of St. John the Baptist) and Christmas. (Scotland had a separate system of Quarter Days: Candlemas, Whitsunday, Lammas Day and Martinmas Day.) Legally these were known as “settling days,” a time for paying rents and settling accounts. Great hiring fairs were held around Michaelmas at which farm laborers sought new employers. Many of these laborers dwelt in lodgings which had to be vacated at Michaelmas when their terms of service ended. In Shakespeare’s Greenwood: The Customs of the County, Warwickshire folklorist George Morley quotes a spectator who witnessed these hired hands traveling from place to place:

“In the Vale of the Red Horse somewhere about Michaelmas Day sundry farm waggons may be seen at intervals piled high with articles of domestic furniture with the rustic children seated upon the top. These are the belongings of the hired labourer whose term of service being ended at one farm is removing to another.”

There is, by the way, a stealth mention of this account-settling in the wonderful late medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Early in the poem Sir Gawain beheads a mysterious green knight; the head then speaks and commands Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel a year and a day later to receive a return blow. Shortly before Gawain sets out, he sees the Michaelmas moon, or harvest moon:

“And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony,

And wynter wyndes ayayn, as the worlde askes,

no fage,

Til Meghelmas mone

Was cumen wyth wynter wage.

Then thenkkes Gawan ful sone

Of his anious vyage.”

Which Simon Armitage translates:

“Yesterday on yesterday the year dies away,

and winter returns, as is the way of the world

through time.

At Michaelmas the moon

stands like that season’s sign,

a warning to Gawain

to rouse himself and ride.”

Why is the Michaelmas moon a warning to Gawain? Because, George B. Pace has argued ingeniously in his essay “Gawain and Michaelmas,” now is the time for settling accounts, and Gawain has his own account to settle with the Green Knight.

It was also customary on this day for tenants to give their landlords a goose. In Thomas Blount’s Tenures of Land & Custom of Manors we read, for the year 1471, “A certain John de la Hay was bound to give William Barnaby, Lord of Lastres, Herefordshire, for a parcel of demesne lands, one goose fit for the lord’s dinner on the feast of St Michael.” Out of this emerged the tradition of eating a goose for Michaelmas, and in time the goose became as indelibly linked with the day as turkey now is with Christmas. (Indeed, Stephen Roud writes, “The Michaelmas goose tradition was once stronger than the modern traditions of eggs at Easter and turkey at Christmas combined.”) In the months preceding the holiday, geese had been allowed to graze on stubble in the harvest fields. This grazing (or “a-stubbling,” as some called it) made the geese uncommonly fat, and it was thought that they tasted best if killed and eaten around Michaelmas. “In Hertfordshire,” Whitlock informs us, “it was considered unlucky not to eat a ‘stubble goose’ at Michaelmas,” which may explain a line from a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on 12 October, 1813: “I dined upon goose yesterday—which I hope will secure a good sale of my 2nd edition” of Pride and Prejudice—which, of course, takes place in Hertfordshire.

The following are some of the lesser-known regional customs and superstitions that emerged from the holiday:

• “In Somerset,” Kingsley Palmer tells us in The Folklore of Somerset, “it was the time to go out after crab apples, which were inscribed with the initials of prospective lovers and then stored in a dark place. They were inspected again on Old Michaelmas Day (11 October) and the initials easiest to read after that time were those of your true love.”

• Stephen Roud writes, “A peculiar custom, which prevailed at Kingston-upon-Thames church in Surrey, until the early nineteenth century, involved the cracking of nuts” during the Sunday service preceding St. Michael’s Day. Goldsmith alludes to this custom in The Vicar of Wakefield: “They kept up the Christmas carol, sent true-love knots on Valentine morning, ate pan-cakes at Shrove-tide, shewed their wit on the first of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas Eve.”

• Whitlock adds, “At Wootton Bassett, in Wiltshire, the tenant of the lord of the manor met in secret to participate in a ‘Word Ale,’ the purpose of which was to perpetuate an exemption from tithes which was originally granted by a Cistercian abbot in the twelfth century. Prayers were said, hymns were sung, and much ale consumed. At Rochford, in Essex, a somewhat similar ceremony was held … at cock-crow on the Wednesday after Michaelmas and was carried out by the light of torches. As each tenant was dealt with, his torch was extinguished.”

• Virtually every authority on English festivals and customs mentions the tradition that blackberries must not be eaten after St. Michael’s Day because the devil landed in a blackberry bush when he was cast out of heaven by St. Michael. The politer versions of the legend say the devil spit on them, though the less polite versions say he did much worse things. This legend may have arisen to account for the fact that blackberries are generally sour and worm-eaten after mid-October.

• In some villages (and still today in London), Michaelmas was the date on which a new mayor was elected. In Kidderminster this gave rise to the Lawless Hour, an hour (between three and four) when the new bailiff and his attending dignitaries were pelted with apples, cabbage stalks and other refuse by the common folk. One witness to the pelting reported, “I have known forty pots of apples expended at one house.” In February 1910, Roud tells us, a woman was arrested for “throwing liquid over a man at Silverdale.” She claimed that because it was done on mayoral election day, she was absolved from guilt: “There is no law on election day; you may do whatever you like.”

All of which begs the question: how are you going to celebrate Michaelmas? Precedent gives us a range of options: feasting on geese, cracking nuts, drinking ale, lobbing refuse at government officials. Given the state of things, I might recommend all four. It would be fitting for the feast day of the archangel to whom it was once said, “Give ear to our voices … That the enemy with cunning craft shall not prevail / To do the hurt he craves / To weary men.”

Agatha Christie did not love Hercule Poirot.

Which is not to say she could get rid of him; indeed, she continued to churn out new Poirot books into her final years. Debuting fully formed, Athena-like, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), the dapper Belgian detective would feature in 32 subsequent mysteries (and 51 short stories) in a career spanning fifty years. With his pocket watch, patent-leather shoes, green cat-like eyes and (depending on your perspective) endearing / annoying habit of referring to himself as the world’s greatest detective, Poirot acquired a reputation for being effete and big-headed. Though he proved a steady seller, in time she wearied of him. “There are moments,” she lamented in her autobiography, “when I have felt: Why-why-why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature? … Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustaches and tilting his egg-shaped head … I point out that by a few strokes of the pen … I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently, ‘Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.’”

If only she could have met David Suchet.

In the late 1980s Mr. Suchet, who had previously played Inspector Japp in the Peter Ustinov television film Thirteen at Dinner (based on the novel Lord Edgware Dies), was invited to lunch with Rosalind Hicks, the daughter of Agatha Christie, and her husband Anthony. During the meal they revealed that ITV was developing a new drama based on the Poirot stories and that they wanted Suchet to play the lead character. Rosalind assured him it was what Agatha herself would have wanted.

Suchet’s commitment to the role became legendary. Before filming began, he read every story featuring the famous sleuth and compiled notebooks on Poirot’s mannerisms, which he consulted during filming. (For a scene in which Poirot prepares tea, Suchet phoned his wife and asked her to find out how many cubes of sugar Poirot takes. She returned with the answer, “Three, or sometimes five.”) It’s said he developed Poirot’s mincing gait by placing a rolled-up newspaper (or, in some versions of the story, a penny) between his legs. Early in the filming of the first season Suchet nearly quit the show after a spat with a director over the question of whether Poirot should set a handkerchief on a park bench before sitting down. “There’s no question he’s obsessive-compulsive,” says Suchet. “It’s not a precious thing. You often hear writers say their characters take over, and Poirot takes over. And that chap can be really irritating.”

But his attention to detail paid off. Seeing him onscreen, even in the first episode, you find it hard to believe that anyone else could ever have dared play Poirot. He seems somehow to have sprung off the page and onto the screen. And in a series that ran for twenty-five years, through changes of producers, the departure of the core cast, and threats of cancellation, Suchet’s performance became the one constant. He’s so good in the role that it’s easy to take him for granted, but in seventy episodes there’s not a single gesture, not a line reading that feels out of place. He so thoroughly inhabits the character that it’s not hard to imagine that in a hundred years, when people talk about Hercule Poirot, they will be picturing David Suchet.

But his is not the only great performance on the show. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about Agatha Christie’s Poirot is how perfectly each of the supporting players—Hugh Fraser as Arthur Hastings; Philip Jackson as the dogged police inspector Japp; and Pauline Moran as Poirot’s mystically inclined but efficient secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon—embody their respective roles. In her first decade as a mystery writer, Agatha followed the “Holmes-Watson-Lestrade” model and the show places those relationships at its center, in the process elevating characters who appeared in the books less often than you might imagine (Hastings only features in eight of the novels, Miss Lemon in four novels and five stories, six if you count the only recently published “Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly.”) The four have an easygoing rapport, abetted by some sharp comic writing; I recently watched the entire series with my family, and on looking back our favorite episodes tend to be the ones that prominently feature the full cast.

In interviews each of the central quartet have spoken of their affection for one another. “Philip and Pauline were great fun,” says Hugh Fraser, “and we had a lot of laughs on set, it wasn’t all dead serious and hard work. Because a lot of the series was set in the 1930s we’d go to a lot of little-known houses that were not only built in the art deco style but were also furnished in that style still. Sometimes when I had that lovely car to drive we’d be driving along country roads or through the middle of London in the suits and the hat and it did feel glamorous.” When producers Clive Exton and Brian Eastman left the show in 2001, and the new production team of Michele Buck and Damien Tammer announced that Hastings, Miss Lemon and Inspector Japp would be leaving the show, you can sense the barely veiled disapproval of the actors. “They wanted a film noir feeling—which isn’t in the books,” says Pauline Moran, “and guest stars. After Philip and Hugh and I did Evil under the Sun we were shown the door and they didn’t include us in the storylines.” She adds, with icy British politeness, “I’ve mixed feelings about that.”

To celebrate this latest re-watch, I’ve reviewed and ranked every episode of the series, in the process revising and expanding a similar ranking I made ten years ago when I finished Poirot for the first time. You’ll find that I do have a slight preference for the earlier seasons—the dialogue, the characters, that grainy 1980s film aesthetic (some say it’s dated but I find it nostalgic). However, there are some standout episodes from later in the series that number among Poirot’s best hours. And when it came time to pick number one, there was never any question which would be my choice. It is the one episode that always leaves me in tears. It also seems to be the consensus favorite among fans.

70. The Big Four (13.02)

A dreadful adaptation of Christie’s early spy thriller, itself stitched together from a previous collection of short stories involving a sinister band of conspirators who blow up mountains and murder people with electrified chess tables. (Script co-author Mark Gatiss has called the book “an almost unadaptable mess”; Christie herself called it “rotten”.) The screenwriters make a game attempt to keep things grounded, but it feels at times like fan fiction and some of the narrative decisions are baffling: Hastings vows revenge for Poirot’s apparent murder but then vanishes from the story; the murderer dies randomly at a convenient moment. Redeemed slightly by the decision to bring back some beloved characters. The opening scene is the best in the series.

69. The Labours of Hercules (13.04)

Following a devastating professional failure that results in a young woman’s death, Poirot is cajoled into going on holiday in Switzerland, where he’s reunited with the Countess Vera Rossakoff (last seen in season three’s “Double Clue,” here played by Orla Brady). The countess now has a full-grown daughter, Alice, whose presence serves to remind Poirot of the life he might have had. Very loosely based on a collection of a dozen short stories, of which the majority are only glancingly referenced, leaving the viewer wishing this had been adapted as twelve separate episodes in seasons three or four.

68. The Clocks (12.04)

Agatha Christie was uniquely gifted at doing one thing (writing whodunits), and her powers waned when she ventured into other genres; there’s a reason we don’t talk much about the romances she penned under the name Mary Westmacott. She was especially prone to the lure of writing proto-Bond espionage thrillers, such as this in which a young woman arrives at a meeting to find a dead man surrounded by a number of clocks, all of them paused at 4:13. The premise is full of intrigue and the cast—including Anna Massey, Phil Daniels and a young Tom Burke—keep things moving along at a steady clip, but the ultimate feeling, as with the book, is one of frustration.

67. Appointment with Death (11.04)

A weirdly subdued Tim Curry isn’t enough to rescue this desert-set episode, in which Poirot attempts to find the killer of a dissolute archaeologist’s imperious second wife. The script spends far too much time on an ill-conceived expedition to recover the lost head of John the Baptist at the fabled confluence of two rivers, and the many flashbacks of the victim beating her young stepchildren are redundant and jarring. That said, the wide-shot compositions are some of the best in the series, and Paul Freeman (Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark) turns up to make a joke about searching for ancient relics.

66. The Lost Mine (02.03)

Mr. Wu Ling, a Chinese-American gentleman, arrives in London to negotiate the transfer of a silver mine to a local bank. However, Ling never arrives for the meeting and his body is later fished out of the Thames. Suspicion falls on a business associate, Charles Lester, whose memories of the evening in question are confused but who recalls stumbling out of an opium den in the East End covered in blood. Some rather obvious disguises and red herrings, though the Monopoly game enjoyed by Hastings and Poirot is a highlight.

65. The Underdog (05.02)

In the short stories, Poirot typically was not acquainted with the victims or their circle before the murder. The show finds ways to incorporate him into the action from the start, and some of the devices by which it does so are, to say the least, implausible. Here, for example, Poirot visits the cantankerous chemist Reuben Astwell to admire his collection of Belgian miniature bronzes just before Astwell is bludgeoned to death. Astwell being notoriously unpleasant, there is no shortage of suspects. Despite having only just watched this one, and having previously seen it on two or three occasions, I had little memory of it apart from the scene where Miss Lemon hypnotizes Hastings into making a hole-in-one.

64. The Adventure of the Western Star (02.09)

Beloved Belgian actress Marie Marvelle consults Poirot about some anonymous letters she’s received threatening the theft of a diamond purchased on the cheap by her husband during a visit to San Francisco. Poirot and Hastings accompany her on a visit to Yardley Chase, the home of Lord and Lady Yardley, who own a diamond identical in all respects to that of the Marvelles. Inevitably, theft ensues and Poirot reveals once again that he can’t be taken in by a clever scheme—though in this case the scheme is implausibly convoluted and the solution self-evident.

63. How Does Your Garden Grow? (03.02)

Poirot attends the Chelsea Flower Show, where a rose is being named in his honor. There he encounters the elderly Ms. Barrowby, who places into his hands a seed packet. Puzzled by her behavior, he arranges to visit her on the following day but learns that she’s died of strychnine poisoning. The most obvious suspect is her Russian maid, Katrina, who—to the surprise of all parties—has inherited the bulk of Ms. Barrowby’s estate. Inspector Japp reveals a surprising knowledge of horticulture. The denouement is very Count of Monte Cristo. Bit of a letdown after the excellent Mysterious Affair at Styles.

62. Triangle at Rhodes (01.06)

In a story that feels at times like a rough draft of Evil under the Sun and Death on the Nile, Poirot’s solo holiday in Rhodes is disrupted by the murder of Valentine Chantry. A vial of strophanthin is found in the pocket of a dinner jacket belonging to Douglas Gold, who had been in love with her. With Hastings still in England, Poirot enlists the support of the fetching Pamela Lyell (Frances Law) to find the origins of the poison. The major problem with this one is that the intricate plot needs longer than the allotted fifty minutes to unfold properly—but of course Christie would recycle the story to better effect elsewhere.

61. The Hollow (09.04)

Poirot underwent a drastic makeover in its ninth season, as new producers came aboard and opted to give the films a more “modern” look in keeping with ITV trends of the mid-2000s. Hastings, Inspector Japp and Miss Lemon are largely absent, taking their comedy and camaraderie with them. This has made the final five seasons controversial among fans, with many preferring the warmth and joy of the earlier outings. But it resulted in some of the best episodes of the series, with season nine being arguably the best of the lot. There’s a thematic thread running through the season of missed chances and lives gone awry, as in this episode centering on a woman who’s found poolside holding a gun over the body of her ostentatiously adulterous husband. But forensic evidence reveals that this gun was not the murder weapon, and Poirot suspects she may be taking the blame for the real killer.

60. The Mystery of the Spanish Chest (03.08)

Lady Chatterton visits Poirot with concerns about her friend, Marguerite, who recently married the much-despised Edward Clayton. Poirot attends a party hoping to glimpse Mr. Clayton, who never arrives. It’s later revealed that he had been hiding in the titular chest, and that someone had stabbed him through a keyhole during the party without being observed. When Hastings notes he only took the case after being “buttered up” by Lady Chatterton, Poirot says, “Do you think it is wrong, Hastings, to enjoy the compliments of the buttering?” to which Hastings replies, “No, but do you have to show it quite so much?”

59. Mrs. McGinty’s Dead (11.01)

James Bentley is convicted of murdering his landlady, an elderly charwoman; the evidence of his guilt is overwhelming. But Superintendent Spence (Richard Hope) thinks otherwise, and seeks Poirot’s aid in finding the real killer before his imminent execution. An attempt is made by a suspect to murder Poirot by shoving him in front of an oncoming train. Meanwhile Ariadne Oliver (Zoe Wanamaker) stress-eats apples and rows with Robin Upward, who is adapting her fictional sleuth Sven Hjerson (an obvious Poirot analogue) for the stage, but insists on sexing up the character. “He’s arriving, dripping with sweat,” says Upward, “having skied the ten miles from the village.” “He’s sixty,” Ariadne replies.

58. The Plymouth Express (03.04)

Adapted from an early story that was later expanded into a middling novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, in the wake of Christie’s divorce. Mining magnate Gordon Holliday asks Poirot to vet an unsavory young man his daughter, Florence, fancies. She has an ex-husband who’s desperate for cash and a jewel collection that renders her a magnet for ne’er-do-wells. When she’s found dead in a carriage aboard the titular train, Poirot must recover the jewels in the hopes of uncovering the culprit. Another victim of the early third season slump, though better episodes are soon to come.

57. The Incredible Theft (01.08)

A middling mystery involving the German theft of top-secret British naval documents, redeemed slightly by one of Poirot’s best lines. When Mr. Mayfield says, “No need to go into that, Mr. Poirot. Let sleeping dogs lie,” Poirot replies, “No, no, no, Mr. Mayfield. Between the husband and the wife there should not be the sleepy dogs.” Meanwhile, Hastings is obliged to share a bed with Inspector Japp at a local inn, where Japp mumbles things like, “Stand back, lads, he’s got a blancmange” in his sleep. The writers are having fun, the actors are having fun, we’re all having fun.

56. The Million-Dollar Bond Robbery (03.03)

The first episode of the show to be scripted by the great Anthony Horowitz (fun fact: he was brought into the world by David Suchet’s father, a famous gynaecologist) sees Poirot traveling to America aboard the Queen Mary, accompanied by a million dollars in Liberty Bonds which some industrious thieves have been attempting to purloin. Ably demonstrating his knack for adaptation, Horowitz dramatically alters the plot and expands the roles of some minor characters, resulting in a story that places Poirot believably near the center of the action. Features another of those mysterious, flamboyant ladies who is obviously up to no good. Fans of old-timey stock footage will LOVE this one.

55. Problem at Sea (01.07)

While enjoying a sea voyage with Captain Hastings, Poirot must investigate the death of a fellow passenger, the imperious Mrs. Clapperton, found stabbed to death in her cabin. Her longsuffering husband, the affable John Clapperton (who styles himself “Colonel” despite never having seen combat) has a solid alibi for the murder, having been ashore at that hour exploring the bazaars of Alexandria. We’re given our first glimpse of the traumas that Hastings suffered during the war and his fascination with shooting at clay pigeons (“Whatever is the use of me introducing you to nice young ladies,” grumbles Poirot, “if all you do is talk about the shooting of clay pigeons?!”).

54. Cards on the Table (10.02)

An inventive premise that almost tips over into absurdity: four “detectives” (among them Poirot and Ariadne Oliver) are invited to the home of the charismatic Mr. Shaitana (Alexander Siddig). Also present are four people suspected of having committed a crime, but who were never convicted. In the midst of a bridge game, Mr. Shaitana is found dead and it’s up to the four detectives to decide which of the four criminals is the culprit. This one is highly controversial among fans for its changes to the novel, including turning a character who was innocent in the book into a killer. Alex Jennings, Lesley Manville (Magpie Murders) and Honeysuckle Weeks (Foyle’s War) all make welcome appearances.

53. Elephants Can Remember (13.01)

Poirot is importuned to solve a cold case, this one involving the mystery of Margaret and Alistair Ravenscroft, an old married couple who died twelve years before. While out walking one evening along the cliffs near their home, Alistair shot his wife and then himself. Their daughter Celia (Vanessa Kirby), now fully grown and goddaughter to Ariadne Oliver, seeks answers. In a major change from the book, there’s the addition of a present-day murder involving a drowned doctor, and a second killer whose behavior feels more in keeping with a pulp thriller (at one point attempting to shove Celia from a balcony). The solution to the Ravenscroft killings is expectedly heartbreaking, though it doesn’t quite scale the emotional heights of Poirot’s other great cold case.

52. Wasps’ Nest (03.05)

Poirot doesn’t always play the avenging angel. Increasingly as the series goes on he acts as an angel of mercy, bringing consolation to the hopeless and using his mastery of psychology to arrange romantic pairings. This episode finds Poirot in “Father Brown” mode, as he attempts to avert a crime against the self and others. Attending a garden fete at the coaxing of Hastings, he suspects evil is afoot when he meets John Harrison and Molly Deane, a bohemian couple who seem to be having marital troubles. A charismatic artist, Claude Langton (a very young Peter Capaldi), has come between them. Superbly expanded from the short story, with a shockingly bittersweet and affecting denouement.

51. Dumb Witness (06.04)

After suffering a nasty fall from the top of a flight of stairs, spinster Emily Arundell is dispatched via poison one evening, her mouth emitting a ghoulish green liquid that will remind astute viewers of The Hound of the Baskervilles. There are subplots involving an attempt to break the motorboat world speed record and two balmy women who live together and think they can communicate with the spirit of a deceased dog. Mostly you’re just glad to have Hastings and Poirot still working together, as the events of the previous episode made it clear that Hugh Fraser’s departure was imminent.

50. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (07.01)

Poirot, having vacated Whitehaven Mansions and absconded to the village of King’s Abbot to grow vegetable marrows, is called out of retirement by the murder of a local industrialist, stabbed in the back by a Tunisian dagger late one evening in his office. This episode sparked justifiable outrage among fans by making no effort to preserve the central conceit that has made this one of the most celebrated mysteries in the canon, though in fairness to the writers, it’s hard to imagine how that might have been done in a visual format. However, such is the strength of Christie’s plotting in this book that the episode almost works even without that final twist.

49. Third Girl (11.03)

A frustrating adaptation of Christie’s rather plotless late novel, involving a woman who thinks she may have committed a murder but whom Poirot comes to believe is in grave danger. While the script happily excises Christie’s mean-spirited jibes at young women of the 1960s, what it adds doesn’t notably enhance the story. A brief scene from the book in which Ariadne Oliver is being trailed by an unseen assailant becomes an interminable sequence that seems designed to pad out the show’s runtime. However, the final scene, in which Poirot again plays matchmaker, goes further than perhaps any before it in highlighting the loneliness of the man and the things he gave up to become the world’s greatest detective.

48. The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly (01.03)

Marcus Waverly calls on Poirot after receiving a note threatening the kidnapping of his young son. Poirot and Hastings visit Mr. Waverly’s grand country estate but are unable to prevent the abduction. A breezy episode, featuring a priest hole, a suspicious vagrant, and an early glimpse of Hastings’ Jacaranda, which breaks down when the pair visit a village pub in search of a full English breakfast. Docked a few spots for featuring a very obvious culprit, and no murder.

47. Dead Man’s Folly (13.03)

The last episode to be filmed finds Poirot visiting Devon to meet Ariadne Oliver, who’s been assigned the task of organizing a murder mystery fete. Ariadne fears that someone is conspiring to commit a real murder; her fears are vindicated when a child is found dead in the boathouse. There’s an old hunk of a sea dog who seems to have wandered in from Cold Comfort Farm and a rakishly debonair Black man who pilots a sailboat practically onto the grounds, only to be arrested for the murder of a gal who’s vanished and is presumed dead (the Devonshire police apparently being unfamiliar with the legal principle of habeas corpus). Thoroughly enjoyable fare, and if you’ve ever wanted to see Greenway Estate, Agatha Christie’s actual home, this is where it was filmed!

46. The Kidnapped Prime Minister (02.08)

Poirot is summoned to Whitehall when the prime minister suffers an attempted kidnapping, and then an actual kidnapping, on the eve of an international conference. It’s the fanaticism of the principal baddie that sticks in the memory, though this is not enough to rescue this episode, which remains oddly uninspired despite several lively set pieces (perhaps because Hastings is sidelined). This is Christie in thriller mode, an ill-advised choice even in the shorter outings, though the method of kidnapping the titular PM is quite clever.

45. The Mystery of the Blue Train (10.01)

A much-improved version of the story filmed previously as “The Plymouth Express.” When Ruth Kettering is murdered aboard a train, Poirot suspects she may not have been the intended victim. Kettering had swapped carriages with Katherine Grey (Georgina Rylance), a timid heiress with the air of Joan Fontaine’s character in Rebecca (1940). Nicholas Farrell, James D’Arcy, the late Roger Lloyd Pack and Elliot Gould (as Ruth’s industrialist father) all feature in this lush and fleet-footed film, though the real standout is Alice Eve as Lenox, who takes on the role of Katherine’s companion and protector when it becomes clear her life is threatened, and whose spirited response to a burglar resulted in cheers and applause from my whole family.

44. The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman (05.05)

In keeping with the show’s mandate to provide more material for Pauline Moran, season five even gives Miss Lemon a love interest—a slightly shady valet who happens to have been working for an Italian count whose murder Poirot is investigating. Hastings is involved in another of those “world’s slowest car chases” and we get this fun bit of back story:

Poirot: Hastings, have you never exaggerated your own importance in order to impress a young lady?

Hastings: Most certainly not! Well, I once told a girl I was a member of Wentworth when I wasn’t, but she didn’t play golf anyway. She thought Wentworth was a lunatic asylum.

43. After the Funeral (10.03)

When Mr. Richard Abernethie dies of natural causes, his estate is divided between his surviving relatives. During the reading of the will, his sister Cora provokes much hubbub and uproar by saying he was murdered. On the following day, Cora is found bludgeoned to death in her bed. Not long after, Cora’s companion, Miss Gilchrist, is nearly killed by a slice of poisoned cake. One actress whom I shan’t name delivers an impressively unhinged performance, looking and behaving rather like an Irish banshee in black bombazine, though the full scope of her acting only becomes clear on repeat viewings. Michael Fassbender, dapper as ever, turns up in an early role.

42. The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge (3.11)

Hastings and Poirot partake in a weekend hunting expedition. Poirot hopes to bag a grouse that will furnish an exotic meal to be cooked at the local hotel, but succumbs to sickness and is soon confined to bed against his will. Meanwhile the owner of the lodge, Harrington Pace, is gunned down in his second-floor study and everyone has a motive. Dodgy disguises and mysterious housekeepers abound in this pleasantly rural outing, and Suchet mines much comedy from Poirot’s melodrama. “Mon Dieu! Look at this, Hastings!” he cries. “I am a corpse waiting to die. I shall not survive to enjoy my tetras a l’anglois!”

41. Hallowe’en Party (12.02)

Christie’s 1969 novel, one of her last, is not beloved in the Poirot fandom. The Mark Gatiss-penned adaptation, which leans into the seasonal atmospherics, is a considerable improvement. Ariadne Oliver attends a Hallowe’en party at which a thirteen-year-old girl, Joyce Reynolds, claims to have once seen a murder, though she didn’t realize it was a murder until much later. Later that same evening she’s drowned in a tub while bobbing for apples. In keeping with the more religious tenor of the later seasons, Poirot insists that “Hallowe’en is not a time for the telling of the stories macabre,” but the film itself argues against him, with its garish jack-o-lanterns, moldering leaves and elaborate gardens concealing foul crimes. Mandatory autumn viewing, stylish and clever.

40. Murder on the Links (06.03)

Traveling in France, Poirot encounters one of his most bizarre and byzantine cases when a man is found murdered near the site of a grave he had been in the process of digging. There’s some good-natured contretemps between Poirot and a pompous, pipe-smoking local police inspector who resembles G. K. Chesterton (and who is about as French as Winston Churchill), but the real highlight of the episode is Bella Duveen, a sultry, sad-eyed stage performer whose sudden emergence in Hastings’ life portends a parting of the ways for our three leads. The moment when Hastings sees Bella for the first time is beautifully acted by Hugh Fraser. (There’s also a terrific sight gag when Hastings assures Poirot that he’s not there to play golf, right as they pull up to the Hotel du Golf.)

39. Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan (05.08)

On holiday in Brighton, Poirot is drawn into intrigue when a pearl necklace that’s lately come into the possession of Mr. Opalsen is stolen. Opalsen had planned to show off the necklace as a prop in a stage play, wrongly thinking he could prevent it from attracting unwelcome attention. While the mystery is fairly rote, there’s a fun subplot in which a newspaper offers ten guineas to readers who spot a man named “Lucky Len” wandering through Brighton, a man who, as it happens, looks remarkably like Poirot. A weird running joke with a fantastic payoff.

38. Taken at the Flood (10.04)

Arguably this is the episode that most improves on second viewing. Controversially, the writers have taken Christie’s rather sedate novel about the death of Gordon Cloade and the effects of that death on loved ones and transformed the baddie into a sneering serial killer who gleefully induces abortions and blows up estates with dynamite. While I tend to lament attempts to “sex up” the Poirot novels, I think these changes work for the most part. It’s not really Christie, but it’s fun. What keeps the episode hanging together is Elliot Cowan’s dynamic performance as David Hunter, in a role that should have brought him more attention. Cowan is almost hypnotically watchable, and delivers what is probably the single most memorable turn by a guest actor in the whole series.

37. The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb (05.01)

A British archaeological expedition opens a pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt, and soon everyone involved is being dispatched. Is it a curse, or something more sinister? Poirot and Hastings, newly returned from abroad, are on the case. The show starts giving Miss Lemon more to do in season five and, as will become typical, she gets the episode’s best moments: attempting a séance with Hastings, revealing that her recently deceased cat was named Catherine the Great because it liked to sleep in the fireplace, and this exchange between her and Poirot:

Miss Lemon: I could say “biog.” Instead of “biographical,” I could say “biog!”

Poirot: Is that a word, Miss Lemon?

Miss Lemon: It sounds efficient. I heard someone say it in a picture. “Gimme da biog on Dutch Schultz, Miss Longfellow.”

Poirot: “Biographical material” will do very nicely, thank you, Miss Lemon.

36. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (04.03)

Poirot’s dentist, Mr. Morley, is found dead in his office with a bullet wound to the head. When Mr. Amberiotis, who had been for a cleaning that morning, dies of a Novocaine overdose, the police suspect Morley accidentally killed him and then took his own life. However, the mysterious disappearance of a woman whom Poirot had seen outside the clinic on the morning of Morley’s death suggests an altogether more diabolic scheme is afoot. The writers make a game attempt to streamline one of Agatha’s three or four most knotted whodunits, though even alert viewers may find themselves confused by the solution. The absence of Hastings is keenly felt; luckily a blustery young Christopher Eccleston turns up to keep things lively.

35. The Third Floor Flat (01.05)

Confined to his apartment with a cold, Poirot eagerly accepts Hastings’ invitation to see a murder mystery play at the theatre. Three young people who reside in Whitehaven and also attended the play enlist his aide when they inadvertently enter the wrong flat and discover a dead body. “You’ll be having murders in your back bedroom next,” grumbles Inspector Japp, while Poirot provides a rare peek into his own past: “You know, Mlle. Patricia, I once loved a very young, beautiful English girl who resembled you greatly. But alas, she could not cook. And, the relationship withered.”

34. Murder in the Mews (01.02)

Poirot investigates the death of a woman murdered in Bardsley Mews on Guy Fawkes Night, the shots muffled by the clamor of fireworks. In only the second episode, already the lead actors inhabit their roles as though they’ve been playing the characters for twenty years. Hastings is surprised to learn that saying “Him collar no very good starchy” means nothing to his Chinese launderer, while Inspector Japp has a memorable exchange with a street urchin who seems to have wandered in from Oliver Twist. When he offers this “bright kind of shaver” a sixpence, the boy replies, “You couldn’t see your way to making it a shilling, could you?”

33. The Dream (1.10)

Poirot meets Benedict Farley, a pie manufacturer, following a series of dreams which Farley reads as premonitions of his own death. Shortly thereafter Farley dies, seemingly by his own hand, but Poirot is skeptical given how keen the man was to continue living. A first-rate early episode in which Poirot and Miss Lemon wrangle over his tisane schedule and Poirot informs Hastings, “To say that Benedict Farley makes pies is like saying Wagner wrote semi-quavers!” (They’re “horrible” but “there are a great many of them.”) This was that period of the show where the writers hadn’t yet figured out how to vary their denouements, so every episode ends with a chase.

32. Double Sin (02.06)

It isn’t hard to guess the solution to the mystery, which involves a stolen suitcase full of Napoleonic-era medallions. What makes this one worth watching is that Poirot and Hastings are, once again, headed to the Lake District, where they meet a young woman named Mary Durrant (Caroline Milmoe), a style icon. Poirot is threatening retirement after a falling out with Inspector Japp, and the resolution to their row yields one of the more affecting moments in the series.

31. The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim (02.05)

After a brief conversation with his wife, banker Mathew Davenheim puts on the 1812 Overture, steps out of the house—and disappears into a fog. Hastings takes over the investigation after Poirot makes a bet with Japp that he can solve the case without leaving his flat for a week. Keen to keep the grey cells in good order, he begins learning magic and is given a parrot for company, leading to this classic exchange:

Poirot: And please, do not fraternize with that creature. I am still training him.

Hastings: It’s only a parrot!

Poirot: I was talking to the parrot.

30. Four and Twenty Blackbirds (01.04)

Whilst dining out with his dentist, Poirot is perplexed by the behavior of an old man who orders the same foods at each meal—except on this occasion, when he breaks from routine by ordering a blueberry pie. When the man is later found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, Poirot’s investigation draws him into London’s art world, where he meets an unscrupulous agent and a nude model who, naturellement, briefly catches Hastings’ fancy. Satisfyingly intricate, with one subtly deployed clue whose cleverness grows with each viewing.

29. The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (01.01)

A fine introduction to Japp, Hastings, Miss Lemon and our favorite Belgian detective, involving a disappearing cook, a bank clerk and an old trunk. Katy Murphy (Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend ’95) plays a good-natured parlormaid who seems to have a crush on Poirot, while a young Danny Webb turns up as a sneering Cockney. The search for the cook leads Hastings and Poirot to the Lake District via train, where Poirot makes his views on the landscape known. “Look at it, Hastings. Not a building in sight. Not a restaurant, not a theatre, not an art gallery. A wasteland!”

28. The Double Clue (03.07)

“In my experience I have known of five cases of women murdered by their devoted husbands,” says Poirot early in this episode. “And twenty-two cases of husbands murdered by their devoted wives.” Yet the Belgian bachelor is not wholly immune to the charms of women, as this episode demonstrates. For here, in the figure of the Russian emigré Countess Vera Rossakoff, Poirot meets his Irene Adler. Anthony Horowitz pens this sweepingly romantic episode that features a pre-Mr. Collins David Bamber, yet another attempt by Hastings and Miss Lemon to play detectives and one of Christopher Gunning’s best scores.

27. The Affair at the Victory Ball (03.10)

“They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere!” cries Hastings early in this episode. It’s the night of the Victory Ball and everyone is expected to attend as someone famous. Hastings goes as the Scarlet Pimpernel; Poirot goes as himself. A party of six dresses as characters from the Commedia dell’arte. By morning two of them are dead. Poirot ingeniously uses a live BBC Radio broadcast (and a rather clever subterfuge) to catch the killer. An expertly clued mystery with a worthy finish.

26. Hickory Dickory Dock (06.02)

In which we learn that Miss Lemon has a sister, Mrs. Hubbard, who runs a student hostel. She seeks Poirot’s assistance in finding the thief who has stolen a string of apparently random items—light bulbs, boracic powder, a ring, etc. The good-natured if slightly timid Celia Austin confesses to some of the thefts, but is later found murdered in her bedroom. Memorable for its deeply unnerving baddie and a devilish method of giving oneself an alibi. Equally memorable (though not in a good way) for a children’s choir shrieking “HICKORY! DICKORY!” seemingly without end. Inspector Japp naively rinsing his face in Poirot’s bidet might be the single funniest moment in the series; reader, I screamed.

25. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (03.01)

It took three seasons for the show to adapt Christie’s first novel, written in response to a dare from her sister and showing off the impressive knowledge of poisons she’d acquired whilst working as a nurse in the war. This episode reveals, at last, the origins of Poirot’s friendship with Hastings. Poirot is a refugee, having lately fled Belgium, while Hastings, invalided from the front, watches newsreel footage with an air of quiet disbelief and repressed shock. When the owner of the house in which he’s living, Emily Inglethorpe, is murdered, suspicion falls on her much younger husband, Alfred. The script satisfyingly conveys the intricacies of Christie’s plotting, though what makes this one memorable is the instant friendship between the lead trio, and the first (but not the last) instance of Hastings falling in love.

24. The Tragedy of Marsdon Manor (03.06)

Poirot visits Marsdon Leigh at the behest of a village innkeeper who had written to say he needed help. Poirot is not pleased to learn that the innkeeper is a mystery novelist, and needed help thinking of an end to his book. But dark deeds are afoot at the local manor home, where Mr. Maltravers has recently passed on. Ghosts are said to roam the property and his wife thinks he died of fright. A wonderfully Gothic episode featuring a wax museum, a clever late-in-the-game ruse by Poirot, and an inn where the duck-feather pillows “have the little ducks still in them.”

23. The Chocolate Box (05.06)

In a story told almost entirely in flashback, Poirot recalls his greatest professional failure, the case of a murder he investigated while working in the Belgian police force. Ambitious young politician Paul Deroulard died of apparent heart failure, but Poirot, acting against his superiors, insists he was poisoned and resolves to learn why. He does learn why—and the answer to the mystery of why the case was never solved will break your heart. Featuring Anna Chancellor (Caroline Bingley from the 1995 Pride and Prejudice) as an old flame of Poirot’s, this one got a rapturous reception when I showed it to my in-laws. A beautifully staged episode with an aftertaste that is bittersweet.

22. Murder on the Orient Express (12.03)

A stellar cast—Toby Jones, Jessica Chastain, David Morrissey—anchors this bleak and claustrophobic adaptation of Christie’s oft-adapted novel. The writers make the sensible choice to emphasize Poirot’s Catholic faith and hunger for justice, resulting in a climactic crisis of conscience that represents a notable (but welcome) departure from the book, which ends in an oddly breezy and abrupt fashion. In the process, the episode becomes in its best moments a character study of Poirot himself.

21. The Yellow Iris (05.03)

Adapted from a short story that Christie would later expand into the non-Poirot novel Sparkling Cyanide, centering on a woman’s murder at a restaurant in Argentina two years before—a murder that Poirot never solved because he was obliged to leave the country in the wake of political upheaval. Now the victim’s husband is hosting a dinner in London to commemorate the anniversary, and has invited all who were present on the night of her death. An eerie, elegiac episode about the power of past events to cast long shadows into the present.

20. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (06.01)

Notorious miser Simeon Lee invites his grown children to spend the holidays at Gorston Hall, provoking much dismay when he announces he intends to make changes to his will. On the evening before Christmas a hideous, inhuman scream is heard from his room, accompanied by the sound of crashing furniture. The family enters to find him in a pool of blood, his throat having been cut. Lee is one of Christie’s more satisfyingly wicked victims, an unrepentant Scrooge who shamelessly hits on his granddaughter and refers to his diamonds as “my pretties.” Features some excellent clueing and misdirection, but overall a rather chilly adaptation, lacking any sense of festive merriment—much like the book itself, in which the Christmas setting felt incidental.

19. The Case of the Missing Will (05.04)

In a story that almost feels like a backdoor pilot for a show about a plucky girl detective, Poirot investigates the murder of Andrew Marsh, a terminally ill gentleman with dim views of the female struggle for equality who surprises everyone by announcing that he’s leaving his fortune to his ward, the young and precocious Violet Wilson. However, he’s killed before he can pen the new will and it’s up to Poirot, with the assistance of a game Miss Lemon, to uncover secrets that have been hidden for twenty years. There’s something wonderfully Dickensian about this tale of contested legal documents and unexpected lineage, and no other episode more fully explored the power that women have for good or ill.

18. The Adventure of the Cheap Flat (02.07)

Poirot is drawn into intrigue when some friends of Hastings purchase a first-floor flat for eighty pounds, a flat that has refused every other would-be tenant. This is an especially stylish episode, with its Art Deco night clubs, sultry torch singers, and treacherous femme fatales who whisper, “Good night, loverboy!” as they dispatch a too-trusting boyfriend. While posing as a journalist for the Ladies’ Companion, Miss Lemon offers some very quotable wisdom: “Anyone who claims to have been stag-hunting in the Bois de Bologne has been seriously misinformed about life on the continent.” This episode also sees the first appearance of Inspector Japp’s hilariously conspicuous secret surveillance van.

17. The Veiled Lady (02.02)

After boasting to Hastings that he would make a master criminal, Poirot seizes his chance when he encounters a young woman named Lady Millicent Castle Vaughan, who needs him to retrieve some compromising letters hidden in a Chinese box. After deducing the location of the box, Poirot and Hastings mount a home invasion (in full criminal garb) and are summarily nabbed by the police. From beginning to end this is the funniest episode of the show, though the best moment, as usual, belongs to Inspector Japp. “Nobody knows his real name,” he informs a fellow policeman as he bails Poirot from jail. “But everyone calls him ‘Mad Dog.’”

16. The Theft of the Royal Ruby (03.09)

AKA “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding.” Slightly more festive than that other Christmas episode, this one sees Poirot staying at the Lacey family home for Christmas (in the same white modernist house we’ve seen at least once already), investigating the theft of a ruby that was stolen from a crown prince. Some children contrive to stage a murder, hoping to fool the unfoolable detective. Fun fact: Poirot says “a prince” once taught him how to peel a mango—a sly nod to a real-life dinner with Queen Elizabeth in which her husband peeled a mango for David Suchet. Thereafter whenever they saw each other, Prince Philip would say, “Ah, Mango Man.”

15. Murder in Mesopotamia (08.02)

Mrs. Louise Leidner is murdered on an archaeological expedition in the deserts of Iraq, her head bashed in. After the death of her first husband, Frederick, in a train crash, she received menacing letters anytime she showed interest in another man. Just a few weeks ago, the letters began to arrive again. Poirot must unmask the identity of this anonymous correspondent in a mystery that is notorious for a resolution that’s deemed preposterous by many. But if you’re able to suspend disbelief, this is a terrifically chilling and disturbing episode. (Fair warning: there is a murder by hydrochloric acid ingestion that my wife found profoundly upsetting.) I’m not typically a fan of episodes set in the desert, but the air of dread that imbues every frame of this one makes it worthy of acclaim.

14. Three Act Tragedy (12.01)

A standout episode from Poirot’s penultimate season, centering on two seemingly unrelated murders taking place at two parties sharing some of the same guests. Kimberley Nixon is utterly winning as “Egg” Lytton Gore, a vivacious young woman in love with a much older man, though it’s Martin Shaw’s performance as aging thespian Sir Charles Cartwright that makes this a uniquely pleasurable episode. Shaw is by turns cantankerous, charming and wholly sympathetic, a stage idol in winter looking back in remorse on roads not taken, and his ability to portray the varied and ever-shifting facets of Cartwright’s personality elevates what was already one of Christie’s better Poirot stories.

13. Sad Cypress (09.02)

Elinor Carlisle is in trouble. On trial for murder, she faces hanging for the deaths of her wealthy aunt, Laura Welman, and Mary Gerrard, a young woman she resented for having stolen her fiancé, Roddy. Mary collapsed and died while eating lunch with Elinor, an apparent victim of morphine overdose. Poirot has only days to clear Elinor’s name before she’s sentenced to death. Gorgeously filmed but suffused with melancholy, painting a bleak portrait of a relationship dissolving as a result of one man’s choices. Making Mary deeply unsympathetic (a change from the novel) only heightens the poignancy of Elinor’s suffering; the viewer can’t help but wonder why anyone would leave her. Elizabeth Dermot Walsh, like Rachael Stirling in the previous episode, brilliantly portrays the anger and grief of a wronged woman facing death. David Suchet has called this his favorite performance by a guest actor in the whole series.

12. The ABC Murders (04.01)

This stellar adaptation of a fan-favorite Poirot novel follows Alexander Bonaparte Custard (Donald Sumpter), a troubled young man with a habit of blacking out and waking to find that a murder has been committed in his vicinity. Poirot receives a series of cryptic letters from the mysterious “A. B. C.,” an apparent maniac who’s going through the alphabet killing people with alliterative names. The two threads of the story come together beautifully during a conversation between Poirot and a suspect in jail that ranks among the series’ best moments. (It is one of Suchet’s favorites.) Immeasurably better than the “gritty” John Malkovich serial from 2018; good writers know that including humor in a story (in this case, a lovely running joke involving a stuffed caiman that Hastings bagged in Venezuela) only heightens its darker elements.

11. Death on the Nile (09.03)

Simon Doyle and Jacqueline de Bellefort were once engaged; but then the glamorous Linnet Ridgeway (Emily Blunt), whose voice, as Fitzgerald said, was “full of money,” swept in and stole him away. Now the newly married Linnet and Simon are attempting to enjoy a honeymoon cruise down the Nile, but are stalked at every turn by a vengeful Jacqueline. Poirot senses murder in the air but is powerless to stop it. Though the pacing is slightly marred by some scenes that could have been cut, this is a sublimely sinister film that capably channels the tragic nature of its source material. I can never resist an episode that ends with grainy footage of doomed lovers dancing together in better times, and the perfection of those final five minutes makes this one of the greats.

10. Lord Edgware Dies (07.02)

Horowitz scripting, the whole gang together again for one of their final outings—what more could you want? Jane Wilkinson, Lady Edgware, is suspected of murdering her husband after she’s witnessed, by several people, entering their home and killing him. The only trouble is, she was seen by several dozen others at a party being held across town at that precise moment. Seasons seven through nine were the show’s peak, as it leaned into darker, more stylish and more cinematic aesthetics without the gratuitous story changes or showy camerawork that oft marred the final seasons. Notably, there’s a clue late in this episode that I consider one of the cleverest, if not the cleverest, clues in the Christie canon.

09. The King of Clubs (01.09)

Actress Valerie St. Clair (Niamh Cusack), who is engaged to be married to a crown prince, is embroiled in scandal when she turns up at the home of an abusive film director and finds him dead. Fearing that she’ll be accused of the murder, she employs the help of Poirot, who puzzles over the strange events of the night in question when a visibly shaken Valerie was taken in by a neighboring family as they played bridge. Beautifully twisted and profoundly moving, this is the best episode of Poirot’s first season.

08. Dead Man’s Mirror (05.07)

At auction Poirot loses a bid on an antique mirror to the gregarious art collector Gervase Chevenix (Iain Cuthbertson). Shortly thereafter Chevenix is found dead in his study, a bullet from the pistol in his left hand having apparently shattered the mirror behind him. Suspicion falls on his adopted daughter, Ruth, who had recently married in secret against his wishes. A highlight of this Horowitz-penned episode is Vanda, Mr. Chevenix’s wife, a middle-aged lady with a spiritualist bent who’s convinced that she’s the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian. Jeremy Northam and the always welcome Richard Lintern turn up in supporting roles. The best of the shorter episodes, with one exception.

07. Death in the Clouds (04.02)

Another oft-overlooked episode that earns its ranking by being a pure joy to watch. On a flight from Paris to London, the wealthy moneylender Madame Giselle is found dead. An examination of the scene yields the conclusion that she was murdered by a poisoned dart; however, the cabin was full and at no point could the murderer have blown the dart without being witnessed. As Poirot questions the passengers, a mysterious woman turns up at the local police precinct claiming to be Madame Giselle’s daughter. Hugh Fraser is missed but Jenny Downham leaves an impression as Anne Morisot, whose ambiguous motives and fondness for disguises seem calculated to mislead the viewer.

06. The Cornish Mystery (02.04)

At its heart, Poirot in the early seasons is a study of male camaraderie. Hastings, Poirot and Japp embody a kind of unshowy brotherly affection that’s rare to see on television. All three are at their best in this standout outing, which takes them via train to the fictional Polgarwith in Cornwall to investigate the murder of a woman who suspected she was being slowly poisoned by her husband. Poirot offers some psychological insight into the minds of “les femmes,” while Hastings explains the meaning of the word hussy: “It’s a woman who’s… no better than she ought to be, kind of thing.” Impeccable rainy-day viewing.

05. Peril at End House (02.01)

While on holiday in South Devon, Poirot encounters a young heiress named Nick Buckley (Polly Walker), who has recently been the target of several attempted murders. When Nick’s friend Maggie is murdered at End House during a fireworks display, Poirot concludes Nick was the intended victim. This is perhaps the quintessential Poirot episode, featuring a grand house, a flamboyant performance from the lead actress, an especially devious method of misdirection, some excellent character beats—Poirot refusing to eat his eggs because “they are of totally different sizes”—and the platonic ideal of a final scene, in which the whole gang eats ice cream on the beach. C’est magnifique.

04. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (13.05)

In 1949, newly widowed Hastings and a wheelchair-bound Poirot return to Styles, the site of their first mystery, to pursue Poirot’s greatest foe, a murderer who employs psychology to commit crimes that can never be prosecuted. Poirot’s wits are tested to their limits in an episode that induces more gasps than perhaps any other. Written during World War II when Christie feared she might be killed, and kept in a vault for over thirty years, Curtain serves as a lyrical sendoff for her most beloved character, and this film leans into the melancholy, from the motif of Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude to Poirot’s final words, which serve as a fitting summation of a twenty-five-year’s journey. “They were good days. Yes, they have been good days.”

03. Evil Under the Sun (08.01)

When Hastings returns from Argentina to oversee the grand opening of a restaurant in which he had invested, Poirot suffers an apparent heart attack in the middle of dinner. He reluctantly goes on holiday in south Devon after his doctor declares him “medically obese.” There he becomes embroiled in a row between the longsuffering Christine Redfern and her wayward husband, Patrick, who has been conspicuously pursuing a beautiful actress, Arlena Marshall. When Arlena is found dead on the beach, having been strangled by a pair of powerful hands, Poirot uncovers a scheme that is almost sickening in its brazenness and intricacy. Horowitz inserts some moments of levity but otherwise faithfully adapts the plot of the novel. Christie typically reserved her most disturbing plots for her standalone novels—And Then There Were None, Endless Night. This is Poirot’s most twisted case.

02. Cat among the Pigeons (11.02)

The Mark Gatiss-penned adaptation of Christie’s classic boarding school novel centers on a series of murders at Meadowbank, a school for girls helmed by the formidable Ms. Bulstrode (Harriet Walters), who’s nearing retirement. After a pilot, Bob Rawlinson, dies with guns blazing alongside his best friend, the Prince of Ramat, his niece Jennifer finds herself stalked by shady figures keen on retrieving some jewels that had gone missing at the time of the prince’s death. One of the best-looking episodes of the series, with a visual style that seems designed to evoke the later Harry Potter movies (a feeling that’s enhanced by the presence of Katie Leung in a minor role). Anton Lesser, perhaps the best character actor currently living, plays a police inspector whose initial distrust of the dapper detective gives way to grudging admiration, thereby answering the question every mystery-lover has asked at some point: “What if Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright met Hercule Poirot?”

01. Five Little Pigs (09.01)

Regrets. We all have things in our past that we’d give anything to do over, which is what makes stories of time travel perennially appealing. It’s also at the core of the murder mystery genre—murderers are typically driven to kill because their life has gone awry in some way and they hope to fix it, in the process forever ruining the lives of others. Christie trafficked in mistakes and ruined lives throughout her career, but never more directly or with more feeling than in this, her finest novel.

Lucy Crale’s parents died when she was a child. Her father, Amyas (a pre-Game of Thrones Aidan Gillen), was a philandering artist who gave up the ghost on a warm summer’s day after drinking a bitter-tasting glass of cold beer given to him by his wife, Caroline (Rachael Stirling), as he stood painting by the lake. Convicted of the murder, she died in prison, though not before writing Lucy a letter insisting upon her innocence. Lucy begs Poirot to uncover the truth about who really murdered her father. Moved by her pleas, he interviews five people who were present at the villa on the day of Amyas’s death (the “five little pigs” of the title), sifting through the Rashamon-like narratives in search of evidence the police may have missed.

There’s no aspect of this production that doesn’t work. Handheld cameras are deployed during the flashbacks to lend a sense of immediacy. The camera transitions seamlessly from a room shown in the past to the same room, cheerless and empty, in the present day. Satie’s “Gnossiene No. 01” serves as a leitmotif, and is now so indelibly linked with the Crales that I can never hear it without thinking of poor, doomed Caroline. Rachael Stirling is by turns angry, anguished, shattered and resigned in what is one of the series’ best performances, irresistibly sympathetic even when suspicion of guilt lingers, but Marc Warren, Toby Stephens and Gemma Jones, each playing characters who loved Caroline and Amyas in their own ways, underscore a sense of wounds that can never be mended, even after sixteen years. “It was as if they hadn’t died at all, but I had,” says one character, and as the story nears its end, the effect of the whole—decisions made in haste, acts of cravenness and cruelty and unthinkable courage—is overwhelming. To call it merely the best episode of Poirot is to undersell its achievement. It belongs on any list of the best episodes of television ever made.

[N.B. With this post, in honor of today’s premiere of Season 2 of Andor on the Disney Channel, we launch a new section for occasional not-entirely-bookish posts: Arts & Culture. And a warning: Here be Spoilers for S1, but not for Season 2, which we haven’t seen yet.]

Disney’s Star Wars spinoff, Andor, which premiered in the Fall of 2022, is a terrific series for bookish people, not because it has anything to do with books, but because it’s that rare franchise TV series that, 1) is worth watching more than once, 2) doesn’t assume its viewers are ignorant of everything except the franchise’s lore and, 3) seems to expect their intelligent audience members to spend time, post-viewing, in vigorous debate over the ethical and political questions it raises in its sharply honed dialogue and (even rarer for television) challenging monologues.

The show was initially a slow burn for me. I had delighted in the childlike wonders of the first season of The Mandalorian, with its inventive score by Ludwig Göransson, but after the ho-hum of the other series Disney trotted out in the SW universe, my expectations were low for this alleged “Star Wars for grownups.” Still, impressed from the first by the seriousness and sophistication of the writing, casting, acting, directing, shotmaking, and production values, I hung on with an intensifying curiosity and sense of wonder. I began to see that what was being set up in this series—with such care and patience, such precision and style—was a Star Wars like no other: an episode in the Star Wars universe for the head as well as the heart.

Then, in a scene between two squabbling and über-ambitious technocrats, scrambling for promotion in the Imperial version of the KGB/FSB (the “ISB”, or Imperial Security Bureau), this zinger smacked me in the face:

You’ve been here, what, just over a year? You might want to steady the ladder before you start climbing.

I was instantly reminded of my favorite line from the whole of Game of Thrones, Littlefinger’s chilling “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” (Surely the operative motto of the present Trump administration.) That’s when I finally realized—sluggard that I am—that this remarkable show, like GoT at its best, was not just a space fantasy but an epic about the quest to gain—or subvert—that Beast of Revelations we call Power.

Like Simone Weil’s “Force” (as discussed in several of our posts on The Iliad, and not to be confused with “the Force” of the Star Wars universe—or like Tolkien’s One Ring—the power that the Galactic Empire is amassing in Andor S1 is capable of snookering and subjugating a universe. Yet, like all the forms of power in our workaday world, it’s also fiendishly domesticated: sometimes petty, but infinitely adaptable to different environments and cultures. Each victim (or perpetrator) experiences it as if it were the manifestation of his or her own personal hell.

Or ladder.

In S1, each character, one by one, is swept up in the Empire’s strangling, ever-expanding web of dominion, and each is either brutalized or tempted to brutalize others for the purpose of advancement—or mere survival. Whether they ultimately resist or succumb, none is left unscathed.

The creators of such a world, I realized, had to be possessed of an acute sensitivity to the psychology of mastery and manipulation; of the game of who’s in and who’s out; of the peril to the soul that runs the length and breadth of the political spectrum, from extreme Left to extreme Right; and of the daily casualties, great and small, that accrue whenever and wherever human neediness (ambition, fear, greed, or the simple desire for payback) is spooned into the already poisonous stew of aggressive and aggrandizing politics.

If war is politics by other means, the writers show us in S1, the reverse is equally true: politics is often war by other means. And, as Hobbes would have it, it’s a war of all against all.

Deeply impressed, I looked up Andor‘s creative team and lead writers, and they turned out to be Tony Gilroy, of Bourne Trilogy and Rogue One fame, Sanne Wohlenberg (Chernobyl, one of the most devastating mini-series I’ve ever seen), and Beau Willimon, wunderkind showrunner of the first few brilliant seasons of House of Cards.

That, I thought, explained why the political grit and perspicuity of this show was on a whole ‘nother level beyond anything we’ve seen in George Lucas’ entertaining but often simple-minded universe.

The Personal is Political

But politics, like story, is always about character. And in one of those serendipitous coincidences life sometimes tosses your way, I happened to be in the middle of Hannah Arendt’s classic The Origins of Totalitarianism1 when we began watching Andor—and was reminded that Arendt also authored Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.2

Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial was hugely controversial. A Rabbi friend of ours described Arendt as “radioactive” in Jewish circles afterwards. Readers misread her phrase “the banality of evil” as a diminution of the evil of the Holocaust—as if she were suggesting that the industrialized genocide of six million Jews was somehow banal. But what Arendt was getting at was the curious phenomenon, illustrated in the dull-as-ditchwater character of Adolf Eichmann (and in Andor by Syril Karn), that the perpetrators of great evil are rarely colorful Eurotrash Bond villains, or Darth Vadars, but balding bureaucrats and functionaries just “doing what they’re told” as efficiently and quietly as possible, nine-to-five, before going home to their spouses, kids, dogs, and hobbies. Or, in Syril’s case, to their mothers.

At first, the very definition of a gung-ho Imperial True Believer, Karn turns pouty failure when one of his Brilliant Ideas—intended to make his career—goes sideways. Men are killed, the rebels escape, and Karn is dismissed from his position. Enraged that he’s been mistreated and misunderstood, and that his talents and zeal are going unrecognized, Karn goes home to his mama, played by the inimitable Kathryn Hunter.3 Eedy Karn greets her pathetic son with a slap, then a hug.

The tiny woman is a powerhouse—a nightmare version of a helicopter parent out of Dickens or Stephen King. Her scenes with her son, who is determined to get revenge on Cassian Andor, whom he blames for his disgrace, reveal that—for once—we are in a Star Wars tale where the villains are not dressed in flowing capes, wield scarlet lightsabers, or speak in snotty public school accents.

Given the time and patience the showrunners took developing this Psycho-reminiscent mother-son relationship—amid all the action and intrigue of Andor S1—I can’t help but think that baddies like Karn and Dedra Meero, whom Karn comes to worship in a kinky-creepy sort of way, will undergo some riveting character arcs in S2. Indeed, I have the feeling we were being set up in this first season for a monstrously scary turn or two in the second. And I can’t wait.

The Villain Doesn’t Always Steal the Show

As terrific as all this is, the backstories and character arcs of the protagonists are, amazingly, even more fascinating—and that’s a neat trick for writers to pull off. (Even Shakespeare gave his best lines to Edmund and Richard III and Iago.) The paths of Andor’s heroes to courage and commitment are far from smooth and highly individualized. They’re also what sets this series apart as a work of art focused on the theme of Resistance. No Athenas here, blooming full-grown from the head of Zeus. These brittle people come to the Rebellion—a fragile coalition of inchoate groups—with fear and trepidation, which is how humanity must ever approach its salvation.

First, there’s Cassian Andor himself (Diego Luna), after whom the show is titled.4 His journey from embittered petty crook to cynical mercenary to resourceful imperial prisoner to seasoned and fully committed anti-imperialist Rebel, is the backbone of the series; but Andor is also the story of how a host of radically different characters—of varying importance, and each brought to their anti-imperial convictions by dramatically different circumstances and choices—somehow coalesce into a revolutionary army with a small but real shot at bringing down the Empire in the “sequels” to this series, Rogue One and the original Star Wars trilogy.

There are too many such fascinating stories to discuss in a short post, but I’ll mention a few of my favorites:

• Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), the elegant Chandrillan senator, publicly ineffectual in her efforts to combat imperial overreach and preserve the Republic, but privately committed to the Rebellion. Threatened with financial ruin and exposure because of the “creative bookkeeping” she’s employed to funnel her private wealth into the movement, she is forced to consider committing her teenaged daughter to an arranged marriage—following traditional Chandrillan custom—with the equally young son of a wealthy oligarch Mothma knows to be “a thug.”

• Nemik (Alex Lawther), the soft-spoken, gentle young idealist—he would surely have been a Romantic poet in another time—whose anti-imperial “manifesto” serves as underscore for Andor’s final choice to turn aside from nihilistic despair and join the Rebels. I sure hope Nemik’s manifesto continues to inspire in S2.

• Kino Loy (Andy Serkis), the floor manager of the imperial prison to which Cassian Andor is sent for a supposedly six-year sentence. Tough but fair, Loy is convinced he’s helping himself (and the men on his floor) by enforcing the rules so they can all quietly count down the days until they’re released; but when he discovers that they’ve all been duped by the Empire—that no one’s getting out, ever—he joins Andor in a desperate prison break and gives one of the several great monologues on display in this brilliantly written series.

The Temptation to the Dark Side

And then there’s Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). The character who, of late, has been keeping me up at night.

Why? Because he’s the one who troubles my soul. The one who makes me ask: what would you do? What should we do? Assuming one is faced—as the characters in Andor are, and as humanity too often is—with the happenstance of being born in one of those “interesting times,” as the alleged Chinese curse goes, when one’s government seems to have become irredeemably tyrannous and corrupt, what is a moral (especially, for me, as a Christian) response?

There’s always the option of peaceful civil disobedience, of course. But in a sufficiently oppressive system, that is the path of certain martyrdom—as it was for Bl. Franz Jägerstätter, who quietly refused to serve in the German Army during WWII because it meant taking an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, which he, in his Christian conscience, could not do.5 But how many of us have the courage of the martyrs? (I always think of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in which the protagonist, a 12-year-old girl, avers, “she could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”)

I don’t know about you, but in my case it would have to be pretty damn quick.

And then there’s the problem of the effect on loved ones. “Empires” like to set examples by holding one’s family hostage. Jägerstätter’s family nearly starved to death during the war because of his stance. I ask myself: Could I risk that? Would I have the right to risk that?

And that doesn’t even begin to deal with the problem of when it is justified—or even the best response—to use violence. Force. I can’t seem to wrap my head around it or find any clarity. My understanding is that the Catholic Church has always defended the concept of a “just war” (and if WWII wasn’t one, then there is no such critter). But what does that mean when the issue is whether to take up violent methods on one’s own initiative, without the placet of a legitimate authority to declare war? It’s so easy for volatile human nature to deceive itself in such matters. And I worry about that.

What I appreciate so much about Andor is that it doesn’t shy away from such conundrums. Indeed, it seems to be a central theme in several character arcs, particularly that of Rebel leader and all-around man-behind-the-curtain, Luthen Rael, who in the final episode of S1 is given a brilliant dramatic monologue in response to another rebel’s question: “And what did you sacrifice?” Unlike Luthen, this man has a family to worry about.

Luthen replies:

Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I've given up all chance at inner peace. I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!

“I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them…”

Ah, there it is again: the One Ring. Power. The Power of the Dark Side. Force. That which, if we employ it, according to Simone Weil, turns a human into a thing. Those who take up the sword, Jesus warns, will die by the sword.

So what happens when the “everything” you sacrifice includes your own conscience? We know what this algorithm did to Anakin Skywalker, so what about Luthen Rael? He came to Ferrix, after all, in the final ep of S1, with the express purpose of killing Andor—not because Andor had betrayed the Rebellion, but just because he’s a “loose end.” Luthen changes his mind, as far as I can tell, only because he sees that Andor has undergone a conversion to the Rebellion. What if he hadn’t?

Luthen Rael is the character in Andor—Saw Gerrero (Forest Whitaker) is another, and he’s half mad— who seems to reckon the sacrifice of his conscience (his “decency”) as a necessary evil. But however much I admire him, and however much it is apparent that some form of rebellion is wholly justfied in the circumstances presented to us in the story, I continue to struggle with grave doubts about where the lines should be drawn. Either way, I hope this thread is picked up—and wound up, however painfully—in S2.

Saints and Rebels

As I said, I’ve been thinking about all this stuff on and off ever since S1 ended, and I’ve asked myself: is this the reason Franz Jägerstätter has already been declared “Blessed,” and his cause for canonization is moving forward, while, so far as I know, no one has ever proposed such a thing for the equally Catholic Claus von Stauffenberg, who failed in an attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944.6

In another one of life’s little “Synchronicities,” my anticipation for Andor S2 this past week has been seasoned by a remarkable stream of the kind of news stories (such as the death of Pope Francis) and somber op ed pieces that tend to herald, I’ve noticed in my seven decades of life, the arrival of some new and disturbing period of “interesting times.” Without presuming to proffer amateur political opinions on the implications of these essays, I’d like to share them here as links—food for thought, let’s say, for those of you who, like me, are preparing to watch the final season of Andor with troubling questions lighting up various pathways in your brain. Questions about real-life Empires and the appalling necessity, sometimes, for Rebellions.

Here are the links. (One of them is on Substack):

1. Timothy Snyder: The Next Terrorist Attack. And What Comes After.

2. Ross Douthat: The Age of Extinction is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

3. David Brooks: What’s Happening is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That’s Not Normal.

As Cormac McCarthy wrote in No Country For Old Men, “You can’t stop what’s coming.”7 Let us all hope—and pray—that “what’s coming” is not some rough beast, its hour come round at last.8