David Cameron returns to politics, to take up the foreign secretary portfolio from a seat in the Lords, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist isn’t having any of it:

A man who deserted his office is now painted as an example of duty. In British politics, the appearance of competence is more important than the evidence of it. Aesthetics trump achievement. Nothing demonstrates this more than the renaissance of Mr Cameron.

The contempt is amusing, of course, but I have to confess that the real view from across the Atlantic is that of envy: no Canadian columnist, in a comparable political situation, would assume such a tone.

I spent the past few weeks taking in Martin Amis’s as yet appreciated final novel, Inside Story (2020). It’s many things—it includes some of the clearest and most thoughtful practical advice about writing, for example—but it also doesn’t have to be anything more than a story about a man who misses his friend.

Here’s a beautiful passage that I keep thinking about:

Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word), That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I'd be a part of it.