There’s a famous line, delivered by Orson Welles, in the 1940s film noir The Third Man: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Welles is said to have written that line himself. The Swiss government reputedly sent him an angry letter, in which they wrote ‘We don’t make cuckoo clocks.’
