One of the lovely things about living in London is that people come through the city to tell the world what they’ve been up to.

Tonight I was mostly spouse and bag carrier, but I felt lucky to be part of a wonderfully bijou book launch at a tiny bookshop called The Gilded Acorn near LSE where my wife works.

There were eleven people in the room, and I think one of them was the author’s sister as videographer. I was sitting on the floor on my knees and they began to hurt. People offered me seats that looked awkward so I pretended to be fine…

The book has a great cover, and in the fifteen minutes we could stay I felt some kind of oblique transmission. I heard the book was written amidst the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s election, making the brutality of power explicit in ways that had been relatively concealed.

And I enjoyed hearing Tahir Amin’s journey - from Doncaster to Yorkshire to corporate law, and then disillusion with law’s complicity with concentrating and compounding power; and a journey of discovery in more ways than one in India, and the recognition of intellectual property as a means of enclosure, and unlearning his prior love of capitalism, and then realising there was scope to resist.

We had to leave before he got to public health, but I enjoyed the bildung testimony - you could see the boy in the man, and he was proud of him.