‘Sounds like fun,’ said my husband, wearing a hat with the sign ‘Irony’ in its band. He had read a review of ‘a gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set on the River Humber’. The name of the drama was Jack Lear.

A true drama that gripped the popular tabloids is that of Jack Shepherd, convicted in absentia for the manslaughter of a young woman he took out in a speedboat on the Thames, and now in jail in Georgia (on the Black Sea) facing extradition.