“... the centre they petered out. Deirdre didn’t like the mysteriously appearing flags. She read them as a petty, Little Englander warning to immigrants in a place, once Labour through and through, that has fallen hard for Nigel Farage. Blyth was for generations a skilled labourers’ town, a place of shipbuilding, coal shipping and coal mining. But ...”

“... with about the same clarity that I remember the young Jane Eyre, Mary from The Secret Garden, Peter Pan and Alice. Rather less clarity, in fact, since the last four are readily available on my bookshelves and I have reacquainted myself with them quite regularly. Jennifer, I’ve merely remembered from time to time over an increasing distance of years, and ...”

“... to the bottom in literacy and poverty. At independence, only 12 per cent of the population could read or write. Comparable figures for Jamaica were 72 per cent, Sri Lanka 63 per cent, Malaya 40 per cent. As for poverty, per capita income in India today is still only about a sixth of that of Malaysia, a third of that of Jamaica, and not much more than half ...”

“... from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor ...”

“... we needed money – for a PlayStation, an Xbox, they bought them for us. They sent keyworkers. I read this stuff, people are unpleasant with what the council did, but for me they did it all.’ Karen and her boys lived in a local hotel for four months, paid for by the council, before accepting a brand new flat off High Street Kensington. Though she had ...”

“... written by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto, but Matthews had been busy at the time and didn’t read it for a while. He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 coin for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing ...”