The genius of Hilary Mantel

Yes, but why did the IMF put out its Tuesday night statement? Even if all its criticisms of the government’s new economic policy were correct, why the rush? The IMF’s action is insulting to a G7 country and premature because its thoughts were inevitably composed without full knowledge. It is best seen as part of a pattern, like the early attempts to reverse Brexit, or the US government’s related interventions over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The people who have been running the developed world badly for more than two decades resent those who now challenge them. They pick their moments. The coup de grâce to Boris Johnson earlier this year was delivered by Lord Macdonald, the former head of the Foreign Office. I would not be surprised to learn that friends of Sir Tom Scholar, the head of the Treasury recently and abruptly pushed out by the Truss government, have been expressing their dismay to their friends in the IMF’s headquarters in Washington. There are plenty of sensible anxieties about the Truss/Kwarteng project to be expressed, but for a global institution to attack it in public at its birth is not wise counsel: it is a deliberately unfriendly and political act. I hope the Chancellor and Prime Minister now fight back.

Judging a literary prize can be a wearisome trudge through mediocrity, but I remember an opposite experience. Towards the end of 1986, I chaired the judges of the first Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for this paper. It was for ‘the writer best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or people’, something that Shiva, who had died much too young, had done so well. I picked up an entry which began thus: ‘There are children, frail and moribund, who live inside plastic bubbles; their immune systems have not developed, and so they have to be protected from the outside world, their air specially filtered, and their nourishment – you cannot call it food – passed to them through special ducts, by gloved and sterile hands.