Mark Aldridge

Shall I leave it in?

Or bleep it, let people guess who was who.

The moving finger is the obvious comparison.

Do you remember Miss Marvel turning up at the end of this and going, no, I worked out he's a bad one after all.

Yes, yes.

So our first one is about politics and politicking.

So the idea of, you know, that you're canvassing in a way and that you're trying to get people on your side.

And that's a fairly obvious theme.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I'd said when we were writing up these notes, I'd initially put, it's unusual for Agatha to be so political, and you quite rightly put, we talk constantly about how she's political, but I mean party political.

The idea that she actually embraces the mechanics of what it means.

Yes, yes.

Gillian Gill points out that Agatha's conservatism was conservatism with a small C, even if she did vote conservative.

She wasn't like an active party member.

Yeah.

She was above all committed to tolerance and compassion in all aspects of life.

We can see that, obviously.

And she feared that the militant orthodoxies of the 20th century, fascist as well as communist, would prove less tolerant and less compassionate.

Well, could I recommend a podcast called The Swinging Christies?

In which we talk at length.