Arianne Shahvisi

Recognising the role of moral luck encourages empathy and humility, but it also threatens the notions of culpability that help us to make sense of evil. Luke Holland died in 2020, a few months before the release of Final Account. Watching it again I could not find my way to thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I was, and remain, quite sure that I wouldn’t have been a Nazi.

Even the most effective tools get blunt through overwork, and parliamentary transcripts document the rise in recent years of terrorism’s slyer and more versatile cousin, ‘extremism’. (The act of defining undercuts the term: extremism is all that is not moderate, while the government gets to define moderation.)

My grandfather worked as a school building inspector from the 1950s to the 1980s. Farajollah Shahvisi travelled the perilous, slow-going roads that ribbon around the jagged, scrub-tufted peaks of Iranian Kurdistan, visiting schools with keeling walls and dripping roofs. There was a lot of theft. Builders would make off with government-issue cement, stuff gaps with debris and let bricks sit loose. A fault-finder by nature, my grandfather would close down schools and report cowboy developers, who’d be ordered to rebuild for free.

The conceptual if not the literal ancestors of most of Britain’s chickens were smuggled into the country disguised as Easter eggs. Their bootlegger was Antony Fisher, a former RAF pilot who had been advised by Friedrich Hayek to make his mark not by getting into politics but by nudging public opinion from the helm of a research institute. Fisher went in search of funds. On a trip to the US, he saw fifteen thousand supersized chickens packed into a single poultry house. He wrapped two dozen fertilised eggs in foil and stashed them in his hand luggage for the return trip.