Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph. Boris Johnson wrote up our encounter favourably, along the classic out-of-Alexander-Pope-by-way-of-William-Rees-Mogg lines of ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and ever since then I’ve found it hard to think altogether badly of him.

Labour has sneered at talk of ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ as a post-Brexit economic model, while the tax-cutting wing of the Conservatives has embraced it with a passion. But neither seem to know much about how Singapore actually achieved its remarkable prosperity. Lee Kwan Yew, the country’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990 (and one of the greatest national leaders since 1945), transformed Singapore from corruption, division and poverty by moral, fiscal, social and market acts of genius which gave people a new sense of hopeful purpose.

In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Canadian Literary Review. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.

There’s surely not a more despised creature in Britain than the hornet. They have long been viewed as yellow jacketed killers: wasps on steroids with Hannibal Lecter tendencies. Unlike bees, a member of the same insect family, you’d be hard pushed to find a friendly portrayal of a hornet (with the exception, perhaps, of Watford FC’s mascot). Yet hornets are misunderstood villains. Like bees, they are important pollinators.