Simon Schama: can Charles III’s coronation speak to modern Britain?

About an hour and a half into the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, just as the august baritone of Richard Dimbleby proclaimed “the moment of the Queen’s crowning is come”, a BBC camera cut to a small boy, his hair glossy with punitive brushing, the splayed fingers of his hands pressed against each other in excitement.

And I, also a small boy, wondered out loud to my parents as we watched on our 9-inch Ekcovision TV, “Have his mummy and daddy told him he will be king one day?” “I expect so,” my dad said; “His father, anyway,” added my mum. “It’ll be a bit of a wait,” said Dad. But no one, least of all the little Duke of Cornwall, could have guessed that the wait would run to 70 years, the most protracted gap between coronations in all of British history.