Will Lloyd

One Saturday in 1975 a young man was walking through Macclesfield town center, without very much to do. He popped into Boots the Chemist and began flicking through their selection of records. After 10 minutes of random searching he found Patti Smith’s newly released LP Horses, and quickly returned home with it to Salford. As he recollects in his Autobiography, for Steven Patrick Morrissey finding Horses – in a pharmacy in Macclesfield of all places – was a defining experience: ‘Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed Horses to enter my body like a spear… So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love… The past snaps.

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping? Such thoughts do not bother the critics. They are convinced of their rectitude, secure in their sense of being the most powerful tastemakers in the land. As the New Yorker’s queen of TV Emily Nussbaum put it in 2015: ‘Those of us who love TV have won the war. The best scripted shows are regarded as significant art - debated, revered, denounced.

If I were asked to defend the foreign policy record of the Obama administration my sword wouldn’t exactly flash from its scabbard. Through tedious lectures in Cairo and Oslo, to the quasi-legal assassination of a US citizen abroad and the absurd Iran deal, President Obama governed the Empire with an odd mixture of mawkishness and callousness. One of the more bizarre and underrated diplomatic moments came at the 2013 G8 summit. Vladimir Putin made an astonishing request to Obama: make action star Steven Seagal an honorary consul of Russia in California and Arizona, with a view to being a key intermediary between Moscow and Washington.

Is it still possible to talk about movies without mentioning superheroes? For the first three months of last year, Black Panther accounted for nearly a quarter of all domestic box office receipts. Eight of the top 20 highest grossing films of all time feature men and women who wear capes and fight crime. The consequence of ticket sales being increasingly concentrated among superhero movies is an increasing concentration of superhero movies. Today this feedback loop has dredged up another one: Captain Marvel. The modern superhero was born in the 1930s. Many of them – like Superman and Captain America – were anti-fascists who smacked Hitler around while fighting for ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way.

On Tuesday, after a six-month long poll in which four million Americans voted, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was voted the US’s best-loved novel. Mockingbird is so often at the summit of such polls or described as a book ‘every adult should read before they die’ that another win is no surprise. Lee, who stopped writing fiction and giving interviews almost as soon as the novel became a phenomenon, struggled for the rest of her life with the scale of its success. First published in 1960, as the civil rights movement hit its stride, Lee’s anti-racist novel has been handcuffed to liberalism for the last 50 years. An uncharitable reading of Mockingbird would see it as a childishly progressive fantasy.