Of cabbages and kings

I DON'T usually think about sealing wax when I go aboard a ship, so I'm not sure why I began thinking about kings as I was pricking out my cabbages.

- Jason Goodwin

Perhaps it was the news of our own King's impending visit to America, to congratulate the republic on its first 250 years, or perhaps I felt like a ruler myself, reigning over my vegetable kingdom.

Political forms, like couch grass in a vegetable plot, tend to die hard. Stalin was never more of a Tsar than when the trials of the Second World War saw the Communist state fall back on church and Mother Russia. President Xi—like Chairman Mao before him—reigns in China in the mould of the emperors of yore, at the centre of a vast bureaucracy, holding all the threads of power in his hands. De Gaulle's Fifth Republic has given France a President who is directly elected, but unaccountable to parliament. 'L'Etat,' as his forebear once remarked, 'est moi.