American indians

Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving Fawlty Towers? Happily, there appears to be much more goodwill behind the return of Frasier – the bad news being that, judging from the first three episodes, it might well need it. Kelsey Grammer’s entrance – 39 years after Frasier Crane showed up in Cheers – received a huge audience ovation. All references, however straightforward, to his earlier incarnations got a guaranteed laugh. Nonetheless, for those of us desperately hoping the new series won’t be a letdown, the result so far has required an increasingly effortful keeping of the faith.

It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American west are abducted and then adopted by the tribe. Their plight is appalling — female captives were raped as a matter of course — but sometimes the hostages forget their mother tongue and come to relish the nomadic life of the plains. Another round of trauma follows when the adopted guardians are in turn massacred and the orphans are returned to the alien captivity of civilisation. The famous abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanches in 1836 and the prolonged attempts to find her — followed by her attempts to

Coronavirus has cast a dampener over this year’s Mayflower 400 celebrations due to a hidden enemy with which the Pilgrim Fathers were all too familiar: within months of their arrival in America more than half of them had died of a disease whose principal symptom was violent coughing. There was no official artist on the Mayflower. Its ragtag party of Separatist Puritans had only been granted a charter on condition that their religious affiliation, banned in England, was not formally recognised. So we can only imagine how the New World looked to the cabin-feverish colonists who made landfall at Plymouth in December 1620, lustily shaking ‘the desert’s gloom/With their hymns