Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97 trillion – more than the entire global GDP.

Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books.

A hit man’s character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.

This is the biggest difference between the world’s two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.

Anybody in the world can come to India and find home.

You can go home again, and you can also leave again. Once more, with confidence, into the world.

Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else’s border.

All told, in the colonial period, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 to 60 per cent, Hickel points out. ‘Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.’ The Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sums it up: ‘We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.

A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.

Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.