By a peculiarity of fate, all through this time, they were making yet another movie version of the doings of naughty Cleopatra. It was the most sumptuous and expensive movie ever made—too sumptuous and far too expensive for most tastes—and it sent the studio that made it (20th Century Fox) and all of its investors seriously broke. Everyone saw it, of course, but everyone needed to see it more than once if it was to get its money back.
  Such was the weight of promotional nonsense surrounding the movie—mainly because of the scandalous affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that spilled from the set to break up both of their existing marriages—that the film was bound to be disappointing. Expectations of it were so high that no reality could have got near them. It even caused my mother to rise from her sick bed and go with me to the city to see it—the only time I ever took her to the movies or anywhere else much. She was very impressed, and so was I.

   The film is regarded by some commentators as the greatest turkey of all time, or at least the most expensive, but it is not. A bum rap as some wiser critic said. Rex Harrison is a terrific Caesar, the battle scenes are brilliantly staged and the pageantry is staggering in its colour and movement. It gets let down seriously at its most honest point—Liz and Dick were not able to translate to the screen the intense passion they felt for each other in reality, but they were actors acting, not being themselves.

   The movie doomed the huge sprawling epics and no more screen giants would be made until digital techniques pulled spectacle back within acceptable budgets. It had all been great fun and I would miss them, for I loved them all, even the shockers. Still, Spartacus and Cleopatra, both so maligned at the time but now revered, bookend the period and are the two best of them.

But for me, at some point in my own future, a terrible disillusionment lay in store. Viewed from the year 4000 AD, it would involve a matter about as memorable as the battle fought in the Teutoburger Wald in 9 AD when the Three Legions of Proconsul P Quintilius Varus were slaughtered by the German tribes. It was Rome’s first real defeat and put a limit on the possible extent of its burgeoning empire: the defeat that sent a distraught Augustus screaming through his halls of power bellowing: “Varus, give me back my legions!” Remember?

   Now some people know about the massacre of the legions of Varus, but most don’t and even more don’t care and I believe that my own moment of fate as manipulated by John Fitzgerald Kennedy will be equally unremembered. In a far off country, Communists were, as they are wont to do, stripping the Catholic Church of its vast wealth and redistributing it amongst the impoverished population, and in Washington the Cardinals got the ear of Kennedy—the first Catholic President, remember?—and persuaded him to send forces to try and get their riches back. Kennedy didn’t live to see the ensuing defeat of his mighty empire and its awesomely powerful army at the hands of a bunch of ill-equipped dirt farmers. But I did, and I’ll never forgive him for it.