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In the first, Hackman’s local sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, already cemented in our brains as vicious, reveals himself to be a shrewd mocker of the written word as well.

“Not wishing to put the mockers on Cameron Norrie, but when did GB last have three men in the last 32 of Wimbledon, or any grand slam for that matter?”

Life itself, then, could affront and ridicule and even torment the provocateur: the mocker brutally mocked by personal reality.

As William Hazlitt, the 18th-century essayist and celebrated mocker of 51�Թ�sworth might have said, disbelief is the new spirit of the age.

“There's a quote in the book that goes something like, ‘although a great mocker of emotions, he never felt one of his own,” Skarsgard said.