He also told how when he first became a vicar in south London, he was invited to a home where there was "a presence", a phrase he said he did not understand at the time.

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What was needed, he said, was more "predistribution" - a phrase he has borrowed from an American academic.

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"It may require some suffering, " Regier said, a phrase he repeated several times during a 45-minute session.

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Armstrong later wrote a letter to the Times newspaper in which he said he derived the phrase from 18th Century statesman Edmund Burke.

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Mr Huneeus, who is also a leading social critic, said he wanted to ensure that nobody misused the phrase.

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