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It’s chilling enough hearing the medical forecasts for the impact of coronavirus. But the economic forecasts are almost as worrying. Many businesses have already sent most of their staff home. At some point it seems likely that almost everyone bar essential workers such as healthcare providers will be ordered to work from home. The impact on the economy will be cataclysmic.

I will admit it. I have a frosty relationship with the local Register Office. It’s not really their fault. But I just don’t trust them. The Home Office has turned them into snitches. It all goes back to the Immigration Act 2014. Before then, if two of my parishioners wanted to get married in the church, I could carry out the ceremony without having to ask the state for its permission. The only legal preliminary required was that I call out their names on three Sundays before the wedding.

My book of this decade might seem a strange choice. It was written in 1939. The events it describes began unfolding more than a century ago. It is a biography, something the author completed almost as a challenge to himself. He never wanted the work to be released; he hid the unfinished manuscript, which wasn’t discovered until after his death in 1999 as his son went through his papers.