I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a throne room. They're uniformly built on a very grand scale. The idea is to indicate to the supplicant that they are, indeed, very small fry in relation to the big fish in a position of authority sitting on the throne in the very big room.

So far, so obvious. It’s the kind of thing Donald Trump excelled at. He's probably building a big throne room as we speak down at Mar-a-Lago, so he can sit there and stew about his stolen election and plot his re-entry into US politics and into the throne room in King’s Landing or wherever. He has plans for the Iron Throne, probably with two built-in TV’s on either arm and a button that delivers Micky D’s directly to his chair via a chute. “Make mine supersized.” A chap can dream...