It is certainly not likely to be to every taste. Like The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil and The Changeling, Game of Thrones is a mesmerising, grand guignol portrait of all that is worst in humanity. The kings, queens, lords and leaders of Martin’s world of Westeros manipulate, torture, kidnap, murder and bargain away children and each other in the struggle for power and survival. By turns thrilling, cruel, rampantly sexual, horrifyingly violent and rapaciously political, the novels and TV adaptations are about corruption on a scale that makes The Sopranos look anaemic. “In the game of thrones, you win or you die,” as its exquisitely beautiful, infinitely nasty Queen Cersei says. Or, as a child’s fencing master tells her: “There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: 'Not today.’ ”