The thatched roof of the picturesque Dutch Reformed church in Franschhoek, South Africa, where we have been staying, was sprinkle-hosed the other Sunday. Wildfires have snaked across the mountains, and falling ash could spark.

The crusades bring up images of the ancient cities and harsh deserts of the Levant, of Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion and King Louis IX of France. The crusades to the Holy Land were a consuming obsession of Latin Christianity for four centuries and remain among the most famous episodes of the Middle Ages.

A most unlikely proposition emerged this week in Davos. Larry Fink, interim co-head of the World Economic Forum, proposed moving the annual gathering of the world’s ultra-elite to Detroit or Dublin.

At the beating heart of the Mitford myth is the cell-like linen closet at the top of Asthall Manor, where Unity, Jessica and Deborah, the youngest of the six Mitford girls, idled away their childhoods.

No modern poet​ has had a career quite like Richard Siken’s. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention.

If Theodor Meron had arrived back at his cramped dwelling in the Jewish ghetto in southern Poland just a few minutes earlier in June 1943, he would have been executed along with his mother and maternal grandparents.

Melanie McDonagh, a distinguished journalist, explores why so many high-profile writers and artists became Roman Catholics in the 20th century. Her research shows that the majority of them were Catholic Anglicans who were dissatisfied with the contradictory positions held by their Church and who desired the greater clarity and certainty of Rome.

After a severe fire had damaged various public buildings in Nicomedia, part of modern Turkey, the region’s governor, Pliny the Younger, asked the emperor, Trajan, for permission to set up a fire brigade.

Philip Roth is still with us, against the odds. He died in 2018, aged 85, eight years after the publication of his final novel, Nemesis. He went out as he had lived and written, under perpetual storm clouds.

Ours is the era of Everybody’s Autobiography, and 2026 will not disappoint with a bonanza of memoirs by politicians, actors and rock celebrities. Mostly they amount to solipsistic spouting.