SOURCE: "Cakes, Ale and Soup," in The Illustrated London News, Vol 248, No. 6621, June 25, 1966, p. 36.

I used, in the primeval years, to attend a parish council meeting with a member who was so like Ian Holm's Malvolio that when this actor appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon, I expected him to make an impassioned speech about footpaths. The aspect was similar: the same baldness with the straggling lock, the same smudge of moustache, the odd comic resemblance—as of a very distant cousin—to the Shakespeare portrait.

Most of all, the likeness to my lost parish councillor was vocal. When Malvolio ballooned the ends of his sentences, pinched his vowels, barked suddenly like a choleric sergeant-major, or pressed the Letter speech through the mangle of his idiosyncratic pronunciation, I suddenly heard again those forgotten debates in which a village senate would send defiant resolutions to...