I KNOW I am probably in a minority of one but, even if we took Danny Boyle’s intended message at face value, there was something rather sickening about the way he lauded the resilience of his subjects in Slumdog Millionaire. It tended to imply that there is something honourable about being downtrodden.

Climber Aron Ralston has described how he did the unthinkable – cutting off his own arm to save his life – in his first interview since he walked, bloody and dehydrated, out of a remote Utah canyon.