He came down from Glasgow to do the job, they said, and today’s the day he pays for it. There are the usual cat-calls from the crowd, comic choruses and dances, and when the scaffold is brought out, a great cheer. At one point, the pressure on the barriers is so great that the girls and women in the front begin to scream and struggle, but when the moment comes, there’s stillness, and silence, then the boom of the drop and another roar. “There was nothing more then to be seen,” said the man from The Times, “so the concourse broke up with its usual concomitants of assault and robbery.”

If you haven’t read the vivid account in The Times of the public hanging of Michael Barrett in London in 1868, I recommend it – if you can stomach an honest record of what human beings used to be like, and still can be. The paper reported that the hanging of Barrett, who’d been convicted of taking part in the Clerkenwell bombing, “differed little from other similar public exhibitions”, but it was the last such execution before the law was changed by The Capital Punishment Act of 1868; the last public execution in Scotland was in Dumfries the same year. From then on, the state killed in private.

The reason I say “the way human beings still can be” is that executions, including public executions, still happen in the world, obviously. We had the gruesome spectacle last month of the attempts to kill Christa Pike by lethal injection in Tennessee, and the US Defence Secretary, the gruesome Pete Hegseth, says the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers in 2009, will be available to watch by livestream. It isn’t quite the........

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