The first ever stage adaptation of Barbara Pim's novel Quartet in Autumn will be showing at the Arcola Theatre in Dahlston from the 7th of May to the 13th of June.

With a script by Samantha Harvey who won the Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, Quartet in Autumn is, as Penelope Fitzgerald wrote of the book in the LRB, a deeply touching story of

ageing, friendship and the poetry of everyday life. Book now at our cola theatre.com. Tickets start

from £12. Trump, Modi, Orban, that's the trifecta name-checked by commentators whenever they want a quick way of gesturing to the authoritarian nationalist wave, which has swept global politics over the last decade and a half.

But as of 12th of April this year, one element of that unholy trinity, Victor Orban, has fallen from power.

His opponent, Peter Madjar, a former member of Orban's party, Fides, often described as a

conservative liberal, led a united opposition to a landslide victory.

Having campaigned strongly against corruption and on the rule of law, Madjah's party, Tisa,

obtained 53% of the vote enough for a two-third supermajority in the National Assembly,

thus allowing him a pretty free hand in remaking the country.

Orban, of course, had long been the darling of the international right, funding a transnational

network of propagandists and influences. Domestically, he was accused of an increasingly

personalist politics, remaking the constitution and overseeing a kleptocratic mafia state

in which Orban aligned companies and families, including his own, robbed the state

blind. A champion of so-called illiberal democracy, Orban frequently attacked and undermined

the rule of law and sought out conflict with the European Union and engendered a paranoid style

of politics with a proliferating range of enemies from gender theorists and LGBT people to Islam,

from Euro politicians and NGOs to the Central European University, and of course George Soros.

Over the past decade and a half, his politics got harder and harder,

and the corruption more flagrant and more obvious and Orbanomics unraveled.

So one reading of the election is that a wave of anti-incumbency swept the nation.

His people were simply sick of it.

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