Last summer was a cruel one for the great emblems of Italian cinema.
There is no greater emblem of social division than the grouse shoot, with the underclass of beaters on one hand (poorly paid locals whose task is to flush out the quarry) and, on the other, the Guns waiting in their butts – sozzled toffs and City gents in gaiters and plus fours who fork out hundreds of pounds for the barbarous pleasure of bagging a brace.
Perhaps, as the UK has plunged further and further into trash and nonsense, we have really been preparing for the next coming of our greatest emblem of both.
But there is no greater emblem of the human heart's boundless grace than the sight of newlywed lovers getting arrested together after allegedly starting a drunken brawl at an Edmonton bar on their wedding night.
Although the wrecking yards of history are littered with once-great emblems that failed names like Duesenberg, Cord, Tucker and, most recently, Oldsmobile that hasn't prevented determined men from trying.
Emblazoned on the national flag, currency and the country's national airline, the cedar is the one great unifying emblem of this small Mediterranean nation.
The new work is funnier and nastier and alludes to all kinds of unwieldy things, not least to that great erotic emblem of American whiteness and darkness, Melville's sperm-whale leviathan Moby-Dick.
But for classic examples of calligraphy's potential for refined decorative exuberance, one must return to the great imperial emblems of an earlier time, known as tugras.
Fifty years after its creation, it remains one of the great, complex emblems of modernity, as unforgettable (in its way) as the flank of Cézanne's mountain, the cubist kitchen table or the wailing woman in Guernica.
