“You talkin’ to me?” One of the most famous speeches of the past half-century is delivered with only a mirror for an audience. Alone in his cramped bedsit, clothes drying on a line in the corner, Travis Bickle dons a green army jacket and practises pulling out a pistol. And so unravels Taxi Driver, the classic film study of isolation and lethal madness. “Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talkin’ to?”

Where does it come from, the paranoia that shrouds Bickle? From steering a yellow cab around and around New York’s concrete claustrophobia. “There is this kind of myth that the taxi driver was this friendly, joking kind of guy who was a character actor in movies,” said the film’s writer, Paul Schrader. “But the reality is that it’s a very lonely job, and you’re trapped in a box for 60 hours a week.”

Alone among random customers, marooned far from civic institutions, obliged to work nights and holidays, Bickle is no accident. He is his society’s creation. Which suggests that our society – the society of Uber, Deliveroo and vast warehouses of cheap goods packed and posted by low-paid temps – is creating many more citizens as isolated as Bickle. Long before Covid, Britons already knew in their bones what it meant to be socially distant.

That thought has played on my mind over the past few weeks as the discussion about the failures of democracy has grown ever-more despairing. Perhaps you too popped into a bookshop, hunting for a Christmas gift, only to find an entire section devoted to the democratic murder mystery, with........

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