‘Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the todpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool …’

King Lear, III.4

‘History is what remains when myth has left the room.’

Nicholas Mallinson

Saint-Simon and the Pre-Socialists (London, 1992)