Depending on where one is in the world, and on one’s political-cultural-historical baggage, this spring provides a selection of anniversaries to delight, or provoke, the intellect. America has marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., with that of Robert Kennedy to come. In France, it is fifty years since les événements, and the conscious attempt by student radicals to bring down Charles de Gaulle. In what used to be the Soviet bloc, it is fifty years since the Prague Spring. And in Britain, it is fifty years since the so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech: the moment when Enoch Powell, a member of the Conservative shadow cabinet, said the supposedly unsayable in telling an audience of his party’s activists at a small meeting in a Birmingham hotel that the level of immigration from the Commonwealth was too high to be sustained without serious social consequences, and had to be arrested.

The effects of Powell’s speech have been discussed ever since.

The effects of Powell’s speech have been discussed ever since, and did not require a special anniversary to bring them back into play. Powell was approaching his fifty-sixth birthday at the time. A grammar school boy from Birmingham, he won a scholarship to Cambridge in 1930, where he became one of the most celebrated classicists in living memory: his speciality was textual criticism, and he was not, therefore, a man who could ever be accused of not having weighed his words