‘As the assisted dying question turns once again into a contestation of intolerable pains and grotesque moral outrages, we should take a moment to think of a bigger picture. To recall that it is a man-made instrument. It is not designed to bring us harmony, closure, peace on earth, or salvation.’

The protagonist of the 2024 film The Brutalist is brilliant architect László Toth, who leaves Hungary in the aftermath of the Holocaust to rebuild his life in the United States. While Toth never existed, his character is based on two great Jewish Hungarian pioneer architects: Marcel Breuer and Ernő Goldfinger.

‘If Javier Milei can sack ten thousand bureaucrats, if Nayib Bukele can imprison ten thousand MS-13s, if Trump can buy Greenland and take back the Panama Canal—well, what else is on the menu?’

‘We are at the start of a new era of stilted social relations, endless jobsworths protecting themselves from liability, grindingly rigid hiring rules, untold chilling effects, and general sclerosis in the arteries of capitalism. “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state,” said Tacitus. To which I would add: the more numerous the lawyers, the more inured the people.’

‘It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that same forces that saw the young turn out en masse for the far left Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 have begun to circle around Farage. Like Corbyn, he is an anti-politics figure for an anti-politics age. Like Corbyn, he scandalises the Westminster establishment.’