Such a situation touches off in the reader a powerful sense of historical déjà vu: witch hunts, Gestapo roundups, the McCarthy era, Argentinian death squads, [Francisco] Franco and the murder of [Federico] Garcia Lorca, the KGB and the disappearance of Isaac Babel, the gulagging of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, to name just a few.

This leaves a pretty wide gap in the children's fiction market, and opens the door to the good old British stalwarts. We've always been good at kidfic.

The striker they bought from United was a million-pounder.

This, to the gnostic and the adept, is the simple statement that the 12 elements of the nurturing process outlined in the Bible, taken directly from much older astrotheological cults, must come together to achieve illumination.