“... not allegory.5 September, Mells. I knew about Mells from reading Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox and from all the First World War stuff which comes at the end of the first act of Forty Years On. The church closes off a short street of terraced houses which wouldn’t be remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like ...”

“... thinker was complete without an American epiphany, a journey across the Atlantic to where Ronald Reagan’s United States seemed to hum and sparkle in a virtuous free market circle of efficiency and prosperity. Apart from the reality that, for most Americans, it didn’t, the problem was that extreme pro-privatisation Brits like Littlechild thought ...”