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“... a criminous warren, twinned with the Jago, to a user-friendly film location. The sort of place Neil Jordan could shoot The Crying Game without paying protection money. A million ghosted memoirs (golden-hearted mum, dad on the trot from the Army, thieving from bombsites, clip around the ear from PC Plod, Borstal, Parkhurst, kneecapped by Ronnie, joins ...”

“... whose noble aversions, ignored by Republican France, were all of a piece and apparent on day one in the manger. Last summer, as tempers were cooling, the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud turned up the heat again with his extraordinary novel, Meursault, contre-enquête. Daoud’s narrator, Haroun, is in his twenties in July 1962 when he kills a French ...”

“... alliance. ‘She was what the country needed at the time,’ as my old dad is still saying to this day. And so, ‘in the place of a popular rupture, a populist unity.’Labour, meanwhile, had brought its failure on itself: this is what Hall calls the central ‘contradiction within social democracy’, ‘the principal key to the whole rightward ...”

“... of it. In the first place I like to be reminded that things are happening in the solar system. If Neil Spencer didn’t tell me in the Observer that Mercury is ‘retrograde’ – i.e. moving up to overtake us on the inside lane – I would have no idea that Mercury was doing anything at all in our blinded night sky, going forwards, going backwards, or ...”

“... in the spectacular palace of the emperor Huayna Cápac. But his expedition of 1540 from present-day Louisiana to the Carolinas amounted to a series of disastrous confrontations with Native groups. He ended his days trying to pass as a god before a local chief, only to be exposed when he failed to dry up the Mississippi, into which his corpse was ...”

“... Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed. I wondered if it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the invitation was a direct provocation. He was ...”

“... the lack of public transport doesn’t help. I heard of one case in which Amazon was offering a day’s work on zero-hours contracts at one of its nearby warehouses. They only let you know on the day itself whether or not you’re needed, but the text message they send out arrives too late for you to get the first ...”

“... land. The fishermen were paid a share of the profits made from each three-week trip; after a three-day break they went to sea again, a rhythm that sent pulses of cash-rich fishermen racing to the fleshpots and trinketries of Freeman Street, the backbone of the Victorian town, which ran from the docks to the Marsh districts where the fishermen lived. They would ...”

“... figure than Hallstein, a politician who dealt on equal terms with all the national leaders of the day, Delors led them to the single currency, but failed to achieve the social objectives he had thought he could buy with it. All governments save Britain and Denmark signed up to the first. Few wanted much of the second. Delors did get cohesion funds – help ...”

“... into his plain policeman’s prose. He could do it. At four o’clock in the morning after a day spent combing copses and dragging ponds, never mind house-to-house enquiries, he could do it. Why not his son? ‘You show me up, Martin, having to come along here. I don’t grudge coming along here. But what I would like to have come along here as is a ...”

“... The NarrativeV: Whose Fault?VI: The RebellionVII: The FactsFilm AudioI: The FireIt was​ a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a ...”