SHAKESPEARE apparently made the most of plague-induced quarantine to write King Lear, which certainly puts my own productivity these past nine months into rather dire perspective.

Nor is it helped by Martin Rowson, irreverent cartoonist and jobbing poet, who took the opportunity over lockdown to pen an almost-daily torrent of stanzas in which he cast his impudent, ribald, deeply unsentimental gaze over the unfolding catastrophe.