What happened on Streatham High Road last weekend was exactly what I had feared during my time as prisons minister: a recently released convict mounting a terror attack. It was the second incident of this nature in Britain in three months, but the truth is we are lucky that there have not been more like it. When I was appointed prisons minister in January 2018, I was introduced to the full scale of the problem.

Though Scots are doubtful about secession from the UK, Scots literary figures and intellectuals are likely to be strongly, even aggressively, for it. Conspicuous in this is Anglophobia, which is a default position for many. At an extreme, it amounts to a rejection of the English and Scots unionists which conjures up the rhetoric of racial hatred. The influence of two large 20th-century figures has soaked into the Scots literary ground.

  In February 1945, the Allies, led by Sir Arthur Harris and Bomber Command, destroyed the historic city of Dresden, killing 25,000, most of them civilians. For the 75th anniversary, Sinclair McKay, author of a recent book on the bombing raid, and A.N. Wilson discuss whether it should be regarded as a ‘war crime’.   SINCLAIR MCKAY It was an atrocity. But I hesitate about war crime because war crime is a legal term and not a moral one.

I’ve been playing a lot of Monopoly recently. My son got his first grown-up set for Christmas and, even after time has increased the entropy of his Lego sets and Scalextric, this is the present he still pulls out. I have no objection — why wouldn’t I break off from completing my tax return to watch someone else squirm at income tax? — but his mother is doubtful about the game’s message. She has already forbidden the card game Old Maid on feminist grounds (‘You shouldn’t be stigmatised for not being in a couple!’); should we really be teaching him the fun side of capitalism? One of Fidel Castro’s first actions on seizing power was to ban the game and have all sets in Cuba destroyed.