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“A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good,” Machiavelli cautioned his readers.“Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to maintain his position to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.”

Two oilmen would come to grief, more or less, in the 1920s.

Not intended as a mere star vehicle for its increasingly high-profile male lead, the visually stripped-back production is emotionally revelatory, too: Frecknall’s forensic skills allow us to look afresh at a motley gathering of people, Patsy Ferran’s tremulous Blanche DuBois chief among them, who seek understanding and compassion but just as frequently come to grief.

In the end, both Musk and Twitter may well come to grief.

When powerful, professed men and women of God come to grief, they almost always do so over two transgressions older than the Commandments: sex and money.