Verbal

It's because the elites and the burgeoning middle class have long ago pulled up the drawbridge. Untouchables may not exist in name, but they certainly persist in reality; they are rendered invisible to the elites, who simply imagine them into non-existence. This weird psychological self-deception is at the heart of the Indian objection to foreign aid. (It was evident, for example, when the Indian film actor Amitabh Bachchan complained about Slumdog Millionaire's featuring supposedly mythical Mumbai slums.) The drawbridge is kept up by other means. For example, if you try to buy even the most modest bungalow in a well-heeled part of New Delhi, it will cost an absolute fortune, even by London standards. But the actual price declared for taxation will be a small fraction. One of the weird consequences of this is that few property owners in Delhi hold legal title to their expensively acquired homes. But the most important thing is to buy the prestige of a home in the right place but without paying any but a small fraction of the tax due - tax that, if raised, could have (emphasise 'could') gone to alleviate India's truly epic levels of absolute poverty, and its attendant consequences such a malnutrition, and a host of health problems including physical deformity and diseases that have been eradicated in most other parts of the world.

Will do. But you'll need a head for heights. They're building it on top of the existing stand - they're only demolishing the Riverside roof.

As a Saints fan, I have no ‘second team’, but if I did it would be Fulham, since Craven Cottage is just two streets away from where I live. The ground is also lovely – with a mixed home-and-away end (the only one of its kind)…and one of the few remaining pieces of great Edwardian football architecture, the Johnny Haynes stand. Now the club wants to build a new stand to replace the very dull Riverside, and it looks like this (sorry, I’m rubbish at posting pictures): http://www.fulhamfcstadium.com/design-concept/architecture/ Amazingly for a neighbourhood where houses just across from the ground cost $1.5m or more, and where people get very loudly wound up by anything architecturally new, everyone seems to love this design. If St Mary’s were ever to be expanded, I’d hope we’d do something with at least a similar bit of style…

It's customary - and highly likely in this case - for production companies to agree what's called a 'facility fee' for the people being filmed. I've filmed in SL myself, and that's exactly what we did - which is a bit awkward because you need a suitcase the carry around the huge bundles of local currency worth about $50.

That grim barracks in Fulford? You have my sympathies.

Part of the problem is that Indian elites HATE being reminded how dirt-poor the vast majority of their populace really is. There are more poor in India than in the 26 poorest countries in Africa. And it's a kind of poverty that takes your breath away. In one part of northern India, people survive on a diet of river rats. Indian politicians also hate the way that DFID has been able, with some degree of success, to target the aid where it's needed, and keep it out of the greedy, corrupt clutches of those same Indian politicians. Of course the Indian politicians should pay for this - they're clearly more than rich enough, given the horrendous levels of corruption they shamelessly indulge in. But they won't. There's more money to made from skimming a cut from deals like the one they've just made with the French. The Tories are being naive, quite frankly, if they think that aid oils the wheels with such craven elites as those in India. You either do this kind of thing because you think it's right, or not at all.

An awful lot can be read into that.

Milligan was a Tory - actually a junior minister to the equally upstanding Jonathan Aitken. The 'backlash' from Milligan and his curious death was against Major's absurd 'back to basics' campaign.

Ah, Taylor (Charles), for I knew him well (I was a member of his seminar group when he was Chichele Prof at All Souls). Sorry to hear about your leanings towards Schmitt - he was not exactly an unreconstructed Nazi, but he (unlike a lot of his peers) worked very happily as a Nazi jurist and he never formally recanted his very significant collaboration (including book-burning) and refused 'de-Nazification' from a Party he joined in 1933. So I guess this makes you a Cameronite? And the 'empiricist' label was one applied by Poulantzas to Ralph: it's what structuralists did when confronted with a fact. Which - back on topic - is why it is a shame that Ralph is not at the intellectual heart of Labour, don't you agree?

You mean you sided with Poulantzas in Ralph's empiricist struggle against the Althusserian structuralists?

Ah, a convert to PR!

The bigger point is that the Tory Party have not won an overall majority in an election since they scraped into power in 1992 - 20 years ago!

We've just ended up with the wrong Miliband. Ralph was the one who got away.

No, he meant Ulrike Meinhof.

The West Lothian Question suggests you have no right to an opinion, if that's any help.

Dumbass. (Which is not an insult, by the way.)

An eloquent condemnation of the ecological absurdity of modern capitalism.

My money's on Fulham.

Withdrawn at the request of the 'club owner'. So definitely going. But where to?

Another promise of self-annihiliation? Is your pointy thing facing the wrong way?

But hilarious nonetheless - not least with another hair-brained Austrian conspiracy theory.

I'm guessing you've either fainted or are genetically incapable of qualifying a statement.

Damn, not another biro thief.

Sports Science Dept at Southampton Solent University.

Saintsweb pressure pays off! Hester has 'turned down' the bonus. How good of him.