Anthony Trollope opined that “it is the distance which [democrats] feel to exist between themselves and the throne which makes them covet the crumbs of majesty, the odds and ends and chance splinters of royalty.” This may have been true a century and a half ago, but it is far from today’s reality. Now, radical egalitarians gladly associate themselves with celebrity because the separation between them is a distinction without a difference.

For relaxation, I have been reading the novels of Trollope. I say “relaxation” not “escape” advisedly, for although the stories are set in 1860s and 1870s England, they deal with many of the same obsessions that grip Washington in 2022 — political intrigue, corruption, moral compromise, fatal social opprobrium, and the worth or otherwise of the ruling class. Diving into these 19th-century narratives offers no escape.