It has been absolutely ages since I came across any particularly interesting literary analysis or criticism, but particularly given the time of year, I think I need to flag this Steve Shives video up. As a piece of political commentary, I think it’s especially astute. In it, Shives compares Donald Trump to Ebenezer Scrooge. The two obviously have quite a few touching points; both are utterly selfish, self-important bastards. But what I find cool is how Shives uses Dickens’s famous Yuletide miser to make astute points about current American politics: Scrooge may have had his faults, but at least at the end of the story he realised he had to reform, and was shown to have a modicum of humanity and compassion about him after all. At the end of the day, Scrooge listened to what he was being told, rather than just dismissing the three ghosts as some sort of woke conspiracy intended to manipulate him. It is frankly great to see classical literature still being used to make such wry, observant political points.