“... but the housing pool will still be dry.I sat in Misgina’s living room, a poster of the Virgin Mary on the wall. The flat is full of devotional imagery. One reason she wants to stay in the neighbourhood is that her church is here. It was a stifling day during one of the heatwaves that have smothered the city this summer. We could hear the children, just ...”

“... members of the 1994 Group of ‘smaller research-intensive universities’(Durham, Exeter, Queen Mary and York) would be joining the Russell Group. They hadn’t changed their function at all: they were, in effect, cashing in on their success as places where large numbers of well-qualified applicants thought it was desirable to go. The existing members of ...”

“... which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then there was a succession of chauffeurs. One, named Keith, had a spidery handwriting in which he wrote out the weekly accounts of petrol ...”

“... crop failure, rising tides. The lesser status of their suffering only makes this more acute. As Mary Heglar has written, such suffering ‘barely registers as newsworthy. It’s just “a thing that happens” … It’s the reason Nigerians and Indians fleeing Ukraine are finding closed doors instead of open arms … everyone is used to Black and brown ...”

“... victories (Chile 1962); Bobby Moore borne aloft by Geoff Hurst and Ray Wilson (England 1966); Gordon Banks’s ‘Save of the Century’, and Moore and Pelé swapping shirts (Brazil 1970); the Cruyff turn (West Germany 1974); Maradona about to take on six petrified Belgians, and Marco Tardelli’s primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of ...”