Why would a man like me watch a show like this?

Like anybody both adult and sane, I had no intention of watching Game of Thrones, even though the whole world was already talking about it. For one thing, it had swords. Though I share the movie heritage of my generation in retaining a soft spot for the intricate fencing matches in the Errol Flynn RobinHood and the Stewart Granger Scaramouche, that fondness rather depends on those lightweight swords making a little hole instead of chopping off a limb. Usually, an on-screen sword fight is just a stretch of choreography, dull even when frenzied; or else it gets you into abattoir territory, like that scene in the first season of Rome, when Titus Pullo converts seven gladiators into 10 times as many body parts.

For another thing, Game of Thrones had dragons, and I place a total embargo on dragons. I would almost prefer zombies. Bolstered by these and other relevant prejudices, I managed to ward off Game of Thrones for months. Then a DVD box set of the first series somehow got into the house. It lay unopened while I thought of further objections. For yet another thing, Game of Thrones had Sean Bean as a hero, when everybody knows that Sean Bean is meant to be a heavy, one who flexes his teeth and grits his jaw before being eliminated by Christian Bale in Equilibrium or Harrison Ford in Patriot Games.

“Leave that box alone!” I told myself. “You’re sick, and time is short!” Lucinda, my younger daughter and partner in box-setwatching crime, showed no inclination to help me fight my way through the shrink-wrap. We were still binge-watching TheFollowing. But, one afternoon when I was alone, I found myself taking a peep. Almost the first thing I saw was Sean Bean gritting his entire face, and then there was a blonde princess caressing a trio of dragon eggs. Yet I kept on watching, even as I vowed to stop when the eggs hatched. What was the immediate appeal?

Undoubtedly, it was the appeal of raw realism. Superficially bristling with every property of fantasy fiction up to and including cliff-crowning castles with pointed turrets, the show plunges you into a state where there is no state except the lawless interplay of violent power. The binding political symbol is brilliant: the Iron Throne, a chair of metal spikes that looks like hell to sit on. It is instantly established that nobody in King’s Landing or anywhere else in the Seven Kingdoms can relax for a minute – especially not the person on the Iron Throne.

As for the top woman of the realm, the queen Cersei Lannister, she is a beautiful expression of arbitrary terror, combining shapely grace with limitless evil in just the right measure to scare a man to death while rendering him helpless with desire. She is Kundry and Lilith, Lulu and Carmen. She is Proust’s mother, who tormented him so much by neglecting to climb the stairs to kiss him good night that he spent his entire life writing a long novel in revenge. Lena Headey beams Cersei’s radiant malevolence at such a depth into the viewer’s mind that she reawakens a formative disturbance: did my mother look after me because she loved me, or was she doing all that only because she had to?

Plot-wise, Cersei can thus raise a long-running question: must she behave dreadfully in order to protect her dreadful son Joffrey, the heir to the throne, or is she just dreadful anyway? Would we, in the same position, be sufficiently dreadful to protect our offspring from a richly deserved oblivion? Tussling with such conundrums, we are obviously a long way below the level of the law; and indeed the whole thrust of the show is to give us a world in which the law has not yet formed, a Jurassic Park that has not yet given birth to its keepers. Once this principle is grasped, the dragons almost fit, although, personally, I could have done without them. Lucinda, when I finally forced her to start watching, correctly told me to stop bitching about the dragons: they were part of the deal, the price of voluntarily lowering oneself into the pit of the brain.

If I sound dismissive, it’s just