His favorite amusement is to quietly drop a handful of coins on the floor or ground and watch as people chase after them. No matter where he is, it delights him that people from all walks of life never hesitate to get on their hands and knees to scurry after these small amounts of money, even a wealthy industrialist at an exclusive brothel who only moments earlier was showing off by lighting his cigar with a 100 crown note.

Just because I watch movies for a living doesn’t mean I always understand them, and I was so mystified by the first hour of this 21st-century spy movie that I almost walked out in exasperation.

Hollywood has never had an awful lot of respect for history, so it’s hardly necessary for me to say that any resemblance to the characters in The Duchess to the actual fifth duke of Devonshire and his wife is both arbitrary and unimportant. The failure to be bridled by historical accuracy only helped make the recent royal melodrama The Other Boleyn Girl one of the most trashily entertaining movies of the year.