Of late, I’ve been thinking of a line that I read many years ago in Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss, about Walter Benjamin. “But if the storm is what we call progress,” writes Jeffries, “the angel might be seen as a like...

If you’d give me a gap year with no responsibilities, money to go with it, and tell me that I could use it to study anything I want, I’d enrol in a classics programme. Throughout my life, I’ve had tanta...