Personally, I blame Donald Trump. With the evening news filled with American election stories we ended, in disgust, the one last vestige of our regular television watching: the 6 O'Clock news, which used to run while we sat companionably on the couch, and sipped wine, and ate dinner. We began to watch videos instead. The Lord of the Rings, extended version, all of it, bit by bit. Then George Eliot: Daniel Deronda, and Middlemarch. And I was smitten once more by the work which the Guardian names as the greatest British novel of all time. This adaptation of Middlemarch is a six part mini series, shot in 1994, and it does, superbly, all those things the BBC is so good at: casting, costumes, scripting, editing, lighting, acting and directing. We saw the last couple of hours last night, after driving home from Winton, and I was a bit disappointed that it was over, so I found my copy, the Penguin paperback which I bought, new, for my class on the Victorian novel back in 1972...