Fortunately, Opera Australia’s 'diversity and inclusion' statement 'celebrate[s] different perspectives' and will therefore accept my musings in the spirit intended

Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”

This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?

John Thewall is released from prison with his hands damaged from torture. Coleridge and Sara are conflicted as to whether it is safe to let him stay in the country with them and he is asked to leave.