IN the summer of 2011, on a remote stretch of Salisbury Plain in southern England, a gang of 30 scythesmen, bearded and in rustic clothing, spread out in a line in the knee-length grass. Their gangmaster stood before them; when he gave the signal, 30 blades sliced an arc through the grass, then another and another, advancing in steady synchrony to the sound of a gentle swish, swish, swish. Behind them came women in long homespun skirts, spreading the fallen grass out to dry with rakes and pitchforks.
Of course, this was not for real. This was a shoot for a film version of Tolstoy’s ; the gangmaster was director Joe Wright. Sadly, the sequence was given only 12 seconds in the finished film, despite being one of the climaxes of the book: the moment when Levin, the wealthy
