“Comparing the Covid-19 pandemic with the second world war is a perilous and largely ridiculous game. Yet in purely practical terms, the war was the last time cultural organisations ground entirely to a halt. Robert Skidelsky’s biography of John Maynard Keynes notes that the economist liked to say he used the calm of war to reflect on the turmoil of peace. That reflection led to an entirely new settlement for the arts in Britain – the foundation of the Arts Council of Great Britain, forged from a sense that arts and culture were a way of providing healing and comfort to all of society after a national trauma. This was done in the same political breath as the foundation of the NHS.” – The Guardian