Forget the panto; the classy destination in the run-up to Christmas in London is Simon Callow’s terrific one-man rendition of A Christmas Carol, in which he takes all the parts, but notably that of Scrooge, with just chairs for props, and got a standing ovation the night I was there. The story itself has become the very embodiment of Christmas Past. In fact, it’s so much the incarnation of the season, you wonder how anyone managed to celebrate it properly before it was written. This is peak Dickens season, and peak Christian season. Not, obviously, in the sense that Christmas is more important than Easter, but that it’s the time of maximum overlap between the Christian sensibility and the secular one. The former director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor, in an insightful interview with Mary Wakefield in the Spectator, declared that Christmas showed that the culture is still broadly Christian: the generally shared sense of obligation to be charitable and generous at this time, above all others, is an expression of the character of the Christian feast. And that character was never better expressed than in the first chapter of A Christmas Carol when Scrooge’s nephew tells his uncle reproachfully: