Hi friends!

This week’s newsletter is coming to you from the small town of Brisighella in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. I’m now at about the halfway mark of my trip, and gosh it has been a ride! I’ve really missed travelling — hard to believe it’s been over 5 years since I last ventured outside of Australia and New Zealand.

I started out in Germany, living and breathing museums in Berlin & Munich, then spent a weekend in the Bavarian countryside. A real highlight was Schloss Linderhof, a rococo palace nestled in mountains about 3 hours walk away from the quaint town of Oberammergau. It was built by the infamously magnificent, “mad” and flamingly gay King Ludwig II in the 19th Century (unlike Ludwig’s more famous Neuschwanstein “Disney Castle” the next valley over, he completed Linderhof one before his untimely and highly suspicious death). Come to think of it, I’d love to write about ol’ Ludwig one of these days…

Then in Vienna the trip took an unexpected turn — Taylor Swift’s concerts (one of the big motivators for this holiday in the first place!) were cancelled due to a foiled terrorist plot. Obviously I’m happy to have dodged an attack, but it was a huge bummer to miss the Eras Tour after almost a year of frenzied anticipation. Thankfully I had great travel companions — my friends Lena & Nanna — and the gorgeous city of Vienna was overflowing with generosity towards the multitude of foreign Swifties roaming the streets (easily identifiable by the glitter, themed costumes and wrists heavy with friendship bracelets). Some institutions even offered free entry, or gave away gifts, drinks and burgers!

But my favourite experience was on the inner-suburban street of Corneliusgasse, which become a focal point for Swifties because it shares its (translated) name with the beloved song ‘Cornelius Street’. On the Friday morning fans began to muster, and by the time we joined in the evening the street was alive with sing-alongs, dance and bracelet swaps, continuing right up until late in the evening (presumably some of the bewildered residents wanted to sleep — even as others pumped music from their open windows). It wasn’t quite a billion-dollar concert, but it was a magical communal experience in its own right.

And now I’m back on the roading, travelling by bus / rail / monorail / plane from Italy to Denmark, with London and Canada (reuniting with Samuel in Toronto + road tripping in British Columbia) still to come! If you’ve got any recommendations for any of these spots let me know, I’d love to hear from you :-)

But that’s enough wholesome travel content. Now, back to the bloody history of succession! This week it’s all about mothers, military dictatorships and aspirations towards godhood. It’s a continuation of my last newsletter, ‘No Heir to Spare’, so give that a read if you’ve got a little time on your hands and would like to get up to speed!

The Mandate of Heaven

In my last newsletter I started exploring how pre-modern empires and kingdoms in Eurasia managed the thorny issue of succession. There was often a tension at play between the two goals of a royal succession:

1. Stability: The clear, peaceful and undisputed transfer of power in accordance with generally accepted local customs.

2. Competence: Transfer of power to a competent, high-caliber ruler.

Europe’s medieval Catholic monarchies adopted strict legal codes to ensure continuity of the sacred royal bloodline… which often resulted in placing inbred children on the throne. The Ottomans encouraged a “may the best brother win” policy of fratricide… which naturally led to a civil war every generation or two. And the Mongols never settled on any one system of succession… and the uncertainty contributed to their vast Empire’s early disintegration.

This time I’m going to focus primarily on the two Empires that perhaps loom largest in our cultural consciousness — Rome and China. Both of these mighty states, perched on either end of the ancient Silk Road, confronted the same dilemma: how to transfer the throne from one ruler to the next without creating political instability or placing absolute power in the hands of an incompetent, a tyrant, or a failson. These crises are rarely resolved by the ruler themselves: the real power players can often be found in the royal family, the court, or the army.

Or, sometimes, in the heavens. After all, when a ruler’s claim rested on a unique relationship with the Gods, a little help from the divine could be decisive. And if that divine approval was revoked — if the Mandate of Heaven settled on a new Emperor — then all the norms of succession could be upended.

IV. The Heart and Stomach (and Beard) of a King

Up to this point most of the rulers, heirs and spares I’ve been writing about have been men. That’s no accident; the systematic exclusion of women from the succession was a rare common trait across the kingdoms and empires of Eurasia, from the British Isles all the way to Japan. Sometimes this was set out in a formal decree (e.g. the Salic Law of France); sometimes it mirrored women’s limited legal and property rights; and sometimes it simply flowed from the society’s prevailing patriarchal norms. There were no shortage of Empresses, Queens and Princesses, but these were ultimately subordinate ranks, outside of the male-presumptive line of succession.

There were of course rare instances where a woman did ascend, and ruled in her own right. This generally came about in one of two ways. The first was if there weren’t any acceptable male contenders within the ruling dynasty — a common conundrum in bloodline-conscious England. In the anarchic series of events that inspired House of the Dragon, King Henry I, left without a legitimate male heir, chose to make his daughter Matilda his successor rather allow the crown to pass to another branch of the family. Despite being absurdly over-qualified (Matilda was Empress of the Holy Roman Empire and ruled Italy as regent), her claim was challenged by an ambitious cousin, and a civil war ensued. A queen didn’t rule in England again until Henry VIII’s emaciated family tree led to his daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I succeeding without (much) bloodshed — so few were the alternatives.

The second method was usurpation. In extraordinary circumstances, a ruler’s wife or mother — who’d usually already been the de facto head of the government in place of her infant son or incompetent husband — might launch a soft coup and declare herself the actual head of state. Successful usurpers include the Egyptian Pharaoh Hapshetsut, Russian Empress Catherine the Great, and Chinese Emperor Wu Zeitan. To consolidate power, these women were quick to tout their unique qualities, and formalise that they were not ruling as queens or empresses, but as men: a “Female King”. Hapshetsut assumed all the titles, symbols and costumes of male power — right down to a Pharaoh’s iconic thin fake beard.

Despite how large these women loom in our historical memory (and how often they have “the Great” posthumously attached to their names), they were the exceptions, and rarely managed to re-shape the monarchy in their image. Few even tried. By ruling as men, they re-enforced, rather than undermined, their society’s patriarchal norms (Could Queen Elizabeth I’s legendary “I have the heart and stomach of a King” speech at Tilbury be the original “I’m not like the other girls”?) Even the most successful female rulers suffered a predictable backlash. Empress Catherine’s son Paul (miffed that Mum had held onto Dad’s throne rather than gifting it to him) had Russia’s succession laws changed immediately after her death to make it harder for women to assume power, whilst Hapshetsut’s heirs erased her name from her own monuments and tried to take credit for her achievements. Inevitably, the throne passed back to men, and they guarded the privilege fiercely.

But direct rule isn’t the only way of wielding power. Much to the chagrin of noblemen, bureaucrats, and more than a few historians, there was no area of royal life as consistently dominated by women as the succession. Empresses, queens, dowagers, consorts and concubines had access to a ruler that his other advisors only dreamt of, and many learnt how to use it to advance their family interests and secure a role in the government. A light touch was often necessary, because royal women lacked non-ceremonial powers — their authority frequently came from proximity, delegation and networks of influence. Unsurprisingly, male elites were ever wary of female influence, and ready to sound the alarm. As historian Dominic Lieven puts it:

The power of royal wives varied — Queen consorts held high status in “monogamous” Christian Europe, but an Empress could be demoted in China, and in the Ottoman Empire wives were discouraged altogether in favour of no-strings-attached courtesans. But a royal mother was a force to be reckoned with everywhere. Throughout Eurasia, the mother of the heir was expected to play a central role in raising her son, and if this child assumed the throne whilst underage, she became the presumptive regent: the de facto ruler. More than a few enterprising women spun this into an unofficial reign: China’s Empress Dowager Cixi spent 40 years cycling through a series of child-Emperors (some of whom she wasn’t even related to!) who relied on her to govern. Other women held the regency when a husband or son was off on a foreign misadventure; the magnificent Eleanor of Aquitaine ruled England whilst her war-happy son Richard the Lionheart was off Crusading, and had to bail him out when he was captured and ransomed.

What can be difficult to figure out centuries later is what part, exactly, an enterprising mother played in placing her son on the throne. Take the example of Livia, the wife of Rome’s Emperor Augustus.

Livia wed Augustus in 38 BCE — back when his name was still Octavian, and before he was Emperor. They were a blended family, with children from previous marriages: Augustus had a daughter, and Livia two sons. They never had a child together. Over the next 51 years of their marriage (couple goals), all of Augustus’ relatives and presumptive heirs were disgraced, banished, or died under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Finally, with his daughter, nephews and grandchildren out of the picture and all other options utterly exhausted, Augustus accepted Livia’s son Tiberius as his successor. Ever since, there have been whispers that all the “bad luck” suffered by Augustus’ preferred heirs was Livia’s handiwork; that beneath the facade of this dutiful Roman matron was a cold-blooded killer. Even the respectable historian Tacitus can’t resist the insinuation that it was, in fact, Livia all along.

Livia certainly did something; without his mother’s marriage and status, Tiberius would never have been a contender. And Augustus relied on Livia’s counsel: historian Suetonius records that Augusts privately consulted her on all of his policy moves, taking copious notes to refer to later. But without any incriminating witnesses there is no way to determine where Livia’s influence landed on the spectrum between ‘gentle recommendations to her husband’ and ‘mass-murdering evil mastermind’.

Yet as fun as it is to speculate, we have to tread carefully. The murderous insinuations about Livia come from an all-too-familiar playbook, which attributes conspiracy and malice to women perceived to be “meddling” in the political sphere. Similar suspicions attach to anyone, from concubines to eunuchs to ‘favourites’, who attempt to wield power outside of acceptable oligarchic, aristocratic or bureaucratic norms. It’s a tension that persists to this day — between the ‘right way’ of doing things and the work-arounds dreamt up by the traditionally disenfranchised. But royal women had a reliable trump card: there was no way to make heirs without them. Whether the court and elites liked it or not, women were inseparable from the politics of succession.

V. Thinkin’ about the Roman [Army]

Rome was an unconventional Empire from the start. For its first few centuries — beginning with Augustus in 27 BCE and continuing until the end of the Principate Era in 284 BCE — Rome had no formal system of succession.

This was a recipe for disaster, and everyone knew it, but no one could do much about it. That’s because for the longest time Rome operated under the fiction that there was no Emperor. Instead, Augustus claimed to have “restored the Republic”. He was simply the ‘Princeps’ (first citizen), your friendly neighbourhood ‘primus inter pares’ (first among equals) rather than a monarch. Naturally this was complete bullshit, given that Augustus had direct personal command of key provinces, religious posts, and the army — but it helped preserve the illusion that the Senate and People were still sovereign, and Rome had no king. After all, Julius Caesar had been stabbed to death only a few decades earlier for contemplating kingship, and Augustus wasn’t willing to risk a repeat.

The downside of this cuddly bit of fiction was that no one could set down any clear rules for the Imperial succession, because to do so would be to acknowledge that Rome had all-powerful Emperor in the first place. Each new Emperor submitted to a messy process of being formally awarded the powers and posts he already held. This made the transition precarious, and easily disrupted. The early Emperors were in a bind. They had no overt legal right to rule, no sacred birthright, and no ancient traditions to draw upon.

What they had was the army.

It’s true, the esteemed Roman Empire was little much more than a gussied-up military dictatorship. Even the word ‘Emperor’ had martial origins: in the Republican era, ‘Imperator’ was a title awarded to triumphant generals. Initially it was just one of many titles collected by the Princeps, whether he earnt it or not (Augustus himself was not much of a general); its transformation into the word for an all-powerful ruler in Europe betrays just how important the Roman army was to the imperial project. And make no mistake, the Roman Army — a 300,000+ man professional fighting force stationed across the length and breadth of the Empire — could make or break any ruler, and they knew it.

The most crucial stage in the Roman transfer of power wasn’t the hodge-podge awarding of titles by a docile senate; it was legions’ declaration of loyalty to their new Emperor. This couldn’t be taken for granted. Ideally, an heir would have served as a (successful) general prior to his ascension, and therefore be able to rely on a level of popular support from the legions. Otherwise, he might need to bribe the army with huge bonuses — particularly the Praetorian Guard, stationed inside Rome itself, who picked up a nasty habit of selecting their own Emperors in a succession crisis. But it wasn’t long before the legions got in the on the act too — why should they declare a pampered city boy Emperor when they had a perfectly good General here in camp (particularly if he was generous with pay and war booty), whose claim to be ‘first among equals’ was as good as anyone else’s?

The tumultuous history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty following Augustus bore this out. Tiberius was a seasoned commander on the Rhine, and took the throne with solid military backing. His heir and nephew Caligula was popular with the army from childhood, where soldiers had given him the nickname ‘little boots’. After Caligula was assassinated, the Praetorians elevated his old uncle Claudius — and were richly rewarded for it. Despite his infirmities, Claudius quickly went off on a military campaign of his own, conquering the island of Britain, to bolster his credentials. Finally, in the chaos that followed wannabe-actor Nero’s assassination, it was a provincial general from a lower-ranked family, Vespasian, who came out on top in a year-long civil war and started his own dynasty (the Flavians). Any link between the Imperial purple and Augustus’ family had been severed — it was now crystal clear that military support could make any Roman an Emperor.

With chronic instability like that, it’s a wonder that Rome didn’t decline and fall far, far sooner. So how in the world did this chaotic system survive?

Surprisingly, what worked in Rome’s favour was that the high turnover had a habit of offering up higher quality Emperors. Rome’s first three dynasties ended with the murders of inexperienced and reviled young rulers… who were quickly replaced by experienced generals and senators who got the Empire back on track. Although the old aristocracy were rarely loyal to any individual dynasty, they were invested in the Imperial system itself (sorry Gladiator, no one ever seriously considered restoring the Republic) — no doubt encouraged by the faint promise that their families could someday claim the throne for themselves. This made the system remarkably durable; once a new Emperor assumed power, everyone quickly fell into line.

And then there was adoption. You might have noticed earlier, as I rattled off that list of Juilo-Claudian Emperors, a distinct lack of traditional father-to-son transfers of power. This wasn’t for lack of trying. Roman society had a presumption of male primogeniture, but attempts maintain a royal bloodline were often thwarted by low aristocratic birthrates, high mortality rates, and frequent military casualties. Shockingly, in all of the Empire’s history the throne never passed from biological father to son for more than 3 straight generations! Thank goodness, then, for Rome’s unique adoption laws. Under Roman law, adopted children had exactly the same rights and status as children-by-birth. This meant that Emperors would adopt their chosen successor as a way of making it clear who the heir was (e.g. Augustus formally adopted Tiberius), removing uncertainty and frequently elevating qualified candidates.

A series of judicious adoptions in the 2nd Century were largely responsible for Rome’s golden age under the “Five Good Emperors”: Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius were all adoptees. Part of this came down to luck — none of the first lot had any sons. A biological son was still expected to take precedence; it would have been considered poor form to use adoption to disinherit even the worst of failsons. And predictably, that’s how this golden age ended: with the Antonine dynasty’s first father-to-son handover, taking Rome from the heights of the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius to the lows of his megalomaniacal son Commodus. Cue another cycle of assassination, warring generals and civil unrest.

The Dominate reforms of 284 CE finally saw a concerted attempted to fix the succession problem once and for all. After bringing over fifty years of chaos (the so-called “Crisis of the Third Century”) to an end, Emperor Diocletian created an ironclad imperial system that did away with the fiction of a ‘first citizen’ in favour of greater authoritarian control and a growing bureaucracy. He devised an elevated status for the Emperor more in line with an Asian monarch (purple robes, sacred rituals, limited access, lots of bowing) and mandated that Emperors officially anoint their heirs, bestowing them with clears ranks and powers.

But Rome’s greatest strength — its army — would inevitably foil Diocletian’s best-laid plans. All the formalities and titles in the world couldn’t disguise that legitimacy in Rome always flowed from military success, and ambitious generals never lost their appetite for more power. No legal reform could change a military culture that encouraged the legions to roll the dice again and again, embracing short-term chaos in the hopes of putting a friendly face on the throne.

VI. The Bridge Between Worlds

When the Emperor Vespasian was on his deathbed, he cracked one final joke for posterity: “Oh dear, I think I am becoming a god.” The old general always maintained a sense of humour about his newly elevated status. Roman Emperors were frequently deified after death — hell, Emperor Hadrian declared his boyfriend should be worshiped as a god too — but the living Emperor rarely had any aura of the sacred around him. The army, not the gods, was his guarantee of power.

No Chinese Emperor would have been so cavalier about his quasi-divine status.

If the Latin word ‘Imperator’ betrays the Rome’s military character, its Chinese equivalent ‘Huangdi’ holds divine and cosmological associations. The Chinese Emperor was above all a sacred ruler, responsible for a whole host of rituals that linked the realms of Heaven and Earth. I think the religious dimension played an important part in the durability of the Chinese Imperial system, which endured all the way into the 20th Century — and still has its fingerprints on the 21st. As you can imagine, I’m going to have to resort to a few generalisations when it comes to describing the practices of an Empire that encompassed over two millennia and over a dozen dynasties.

Although China’s first “true” emperor was Qin Shi Huang, who united the nation’s warring states through bloodshed in 221 BCE, dynastic rule in China reputedly stretched back thousands of years earlier, to the mythic Yu the Great. Legend has it that Yu — tamer of the great flood — transitioned China from an informal system of non-hereditary succession to one in which “All under Heaven belongs to the ruling family” (jiā tiānxià). From Yu onwards, Emperors passed this Mandate of Heaven down to their sons. With this divine trust came responsibilities: the Chinese Emperor would spent much of his time performing sacrifices and rituals to appease the Gods and ancestors, safe-guarding the spiritual well-being of the state.

Although under Confucian principles the heir was generally expected to be the ruler’s oldest biological son, a Chinese Emperor had more leeway than his European counterparts. He could, if he was willing to push back against advisors and vested interests, override this presumption in favour of a more promising candidate. The revered Tang Emperor Taizong disinherited his eldest son, then found the next few equally lacking. He finally settled on one of his youngest, the 15-year-old Li Chi, believing he could be moulded to fit the role. Taizong even wrote a guidebook for his son and his teachers to that effect: ‘Plan for an Emperor’.

There were usually no shortage of potential heirs to choose from; like the Ottomans, Chinese Emperors maintained a harem (known as the ‘rear palace system’). It followed a strict hierarchy, from the Empress down to lower wives and concubines. All their children were considered legitimate; even a concubine’s child could become the next Emperor. This made brothers an ongoing succession risk — while never going as far as the fratricidal Ottomans, the Song Dynasty did bar younger sons from any involvement in the army, politics or government (in Europe they were sent to the clergy; in China they became artists) to reduce the odds of infighting or a coup. This was a persistent danger: the harem was its own unique political sphere in which the Emperor’s consorts and their eunuch attendants vied to climb the ranks and place their chosen heir on the Dragon Throne. To limit their influence, this ‘rear palace’ was physically and politically isolated from the other areas of the court — but the most cunning and ambitious consorts carved out a found a path. Wu Zeitan worked her way from a low-ranked concubine to Empress to reigning Emperor, despite the restrictions placed on royal women’s interactions with non-castrated courtiers.

The relative stability of the Chinese system — with dynasties that endured for centuries, rather than Rome’s paltry decades — could be partially credited to the limits placed on the Emperor’s autonomy. China’s administrative elite frequently conspired to push the Emperor to the political sidelines, adding to his official duties whilst leaving the major decisions in the hands of his ministers. This ongoing re-negotiation of the Emperor’s role dates back to the early Han Dynasty: Chen Ping, the Chief Minister to Emperor Wren (180 - 157 BCE), advised his lord that the “true role” of the sovereign was to act as chief ritualist and performer of sacrifices. Rather than governing himself, his duty was to appoint a good chancellor who would manage the state with harmony.

As self-serving as this advice sounds, the system Chen Ping advocated for sounds suspiciously similar to a modern constitutional monarchy (sans all of that pesky voting). By making the office of Emperor larger than any one individual, China was well positioned to weather a few feeble or child Emperors, because the “adults in the room” were already expected to steer the government. Living in safety and comfort in the secluded ‘Forbidden City’, Emperors were less likely than their European counterparts to lead the army or get themselves killed in military misadventures, reducing the odds of top-down instability. Usurpations and assassinations were also relatively rare. Because the Emperor existed on a higher spiritual and religious plane than, say, the Roman ‘first among equals’, an opportunist who coveted power in China was more likely to aim for a ministerial post and try to rule through the Emperor, rather than take his place.

By the time of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th Century, there were 185 types of offical business that had to be directly reported to the Emperor, and mountains of paperwork to accompany it. Sometimes, the ability to handle the role’s overwhelming administrative responsibilities determined who was best qualified for the throne. Faced with multiple potential heirs after the death of her husband, one Empress Dowager intervened in the succession and selected her younger son to Emperor, reportedly because his elder brother had eye problems and would have struggled to manage all that paperwork!

But just because Emperors were discouraged from wielding power didn’t mean they couldn’t, and a despotic ruler who tried to re-assert their authority could pose as great threat as an enfeebled and cloistered one. The threat of a tyrannical or flailing dynasty posed a dilemma for China’s politicians and philosophers. The prevailing cyclical view of history saw the fall of any dynasty as inevitable — so how the state legitimise transferring power to a new ruling family without encouraging a Rome-like spiral of military coups or de-valuing the religious character of the Dragon Throne?

Thankfully, the Mandate of Heaven came with an ingenious escape clause.

This millennia-old theory was a marriage of cosmology, political ideology and sheer pragmatism. It held that the Emperor, as the mortal link between Heaven and Earth, ruled with the Gods’ favour… but this Mandate could be revoked if the Emperor was tyrannical, unjust or impious. The Gods would let their displeasure be known — through natural disasters, plagues, war, and peasant revolts — and pass the Mandate of Heaven to a new dynasty.

The Mandate of Heaven therefore placed the responsibility for removing a bad monarch on the Gods themselves… yet it offered enough wriggle room to justify a successful revolt or coup after the fact. Perhaps the first real test case came with the fall of the First Emperor’s (widely reviled) Qin dynasty. In the revolts that followed Qin Shi Huang’s death, a man of peasant origin — Lui Bang — emerged triumphant as the new Emperor Gaozu, founder of the Han Dynasty. Winning the support of the Confucian scholars and elites who had been persecuted by his predecessor, Lui Bang was quickly held up as the new recipient of the Mandate of Heaven, with the Gods’ apparent favour overruling any concerns about his background or the revolt that brought him to power. The Han would go on to rule for almost 400 years, a model for all the dynasties that would follow.

Future dynasties would be founded by enterprising generals and officials (the Sui, the Tang, the Song) and outside invaders (the Mongol-led Yuan, the Manchurian Qing), all of whom would draw on the Mandate of Heaven to justify their unconventional succession, before settling back into old dynastic patterns. The Chinese Communist Party has never outright claimed the Mandate of Heaven for itself, but the Party post-Mao has been willing to tie itself to the long arc of Chinese history… and its rise via a peasant revolt, re-unification of the state and return to global pre-eminence has an all-too-familiar ring. Given Xi Jinping’s forceful consolidation of power and removal of term limits, it’s worth wondering whether China’s future succession plans will draw on the precedents of its imperial past.

VII. The Next Dynasty

The age of emperors has passed. A few vestiges survive —the Saudi Royal family still maintain an iron grip on Saudi Arabia, and the Kims reign by divine right in North Korea — but the great majority of ancient monarchies have been overthrown or rendered impotent by our modern political systems. Royal succession today is more often fodder for tabloid gossip than a geo-political hot topic, and the pomp and ceremony that once lifted imperial rulers above mere mortals feels faintly ridiculous in the modern era; even autocrats wear trim suits and claim to be ‘men of the people’.

Yet I think there are clear parallels we can draw between these ancient models and our contemporary struggles with transfering power between leaders, parties and generations. The setting may have changed from a royal palace to a corporate boardroom or political convention, but the script is achingly familiar, and the stakes remain terribly high. For all our talk of popular sovereignty, the impulse to keep wealth and power in the family, whatever the dire implications for equality and good governance, has never left us. Set against the long sweep of imperial history, our democratic institutions are still young and precarious — and I suspect dynasties will be with us for a long time yet.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for coming on this long (a bit longer than I expected) journey with me into the history of succession! I’ve really enjoyed digging into the political systems of the Mongols, Medieval Europeans, Ottomans, Romans and Chinese, and I hope it’s thrown up a few interesting ideas, stories and modern resonances. Next time I promise to write something a little more contained!

Odds & Ends

• The magnificent, one-of-a-kind actor Gena Rowlands passed away last week. Her finest work came in her extraordinary collaborations with her husband, director John Cassavetes, where she radiated a raw, live-wire presence on-screen that few actors have ever matched. Her work in films like A Woman Under the Influence was highly improvisational, frequently unhinged and yet somehow achingly realistic. My favourite Gena performance has to be in Opening Night, where she plays an alcoholic actress who completely disintegrates ahead of the debut of a new play, but I’m grateful I still have so many more to look forward to (Love Streams, Gloria). If you’ve never encountered her outside of The Notebook (she played the older, dementia-suffering version of Rachel McAdams) please check Gena & John’s indie masterpieces out.

• Fascinating video about Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes below. They’re not only a series of stolen masterpieces in foreign museums (credit to the Germans, who are in the process of giving theirs back, and none to the British, who are clinging on for dear life), but an active, ongoing art form under threat.

That’s all from me this week, thanks for reading! I’ll write from the road again soon with more updates, plus a few thoughts on some of gorgeous art I’ve encountered on this side of the world.