“... to live in a cottage on South Street with a view of the magnificent cathedral directly across the brown curving river. For many years, into my early twenties, I was encouraged by my parents to ‘keep up with old Grove’ – to visit him at his cottage during the holidays. I’d hand him a tin of his favourite Three Nuns pipe tobacco. Then the two of us ...”

“... Treasury, which effectively plundered their rents. A late 2000s effort by John Healey, then Gordon Brown’s housing minister, to offer councils a new housing deal – reconfiguring debt and letting councils finance their housing stock via rents – was crushed by George Osborne’s austerity regime in the 2010s. Meanwhile government resources that could have ...”

“... a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the ...”

“... outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways of ...”

“... departure. ‘Carrier liability’, as it is known, is an American idea, which can be found in a Bill that went before the Senate immigration committee in 1903 and called for deportations of undesirable immigrants ‘at the expense of the steamship or railroad company which brought them’. When carrier liability reappeared in the 1980s, the US again took ...”