The emeritus professor took brunch on England’s Lane, a habit acquired since his formal retirement. He made for the table by the French doors at the rear, where the view, being of the back of a pleasantly bricked building, was not spectacular, but where the light was natural. Spreading his notes on ...

And so to the professor, my itinerant in time and space, he who has featured in many a fascinating conversation. What’s he doing there? What does he add to the story? Why does he speak in riddles?

Late in the century, decades before the writing, I had the notion that the Twentieth Century itself mig...

Zara opens her notebook at a fresh double page and stares at the dog-eared charts on the wall. Her classmates do the same, roughly speaking, each pondering in their individual way the challenge Mr Garver has set. One chews a pencil, a second scrutinises the gas mask by his desk, fellow scholars stea...

It goes back a long way, back to the very end of the century, after the ‘short twentieth’ had clinched its narrative arc with the tumbling of the Wall and the sundering of a union.

A moment of epiphany, late on in things, made genesis. One girl’s hope amid the vortex, one woman’s struggle against th...