The world is in crisis, seeking a new direction in which to evolve with meaning and integrity—although it often does not seem this way. On the contrary, it may at first appear as if we are heading in precisely the opposite direction, where our experiences are hollow and communities divided.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK, stores draft manuscripts, including one of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). The last line translates to “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, followed by his handwritten “Schluss!” (‘The End!’).

The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’.

In 1600 a Dutch galleon arrived on the shores of a small fief on Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It was the first Dutch ship to reach Japan. Among the crew was an English navigator, William Adams, who managed to gain the trust of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful warlord who became a shogun (the military leader of the samurai caste) in 1603.

During the last decade, and especially since 2016, there has been a widespread tendency to view both domestic and international politics in an extraordinarily simplistic way.

In the summer of 1938, the attention of the world was focused on the state of Czechoslovakia. At issue was what to many seemed a deeply moral question of whether democracy or dictatorship would prevail there. The country was suddenly awash with British visitors – politicians, journalists and curious tourists.

As a boy in the 1760s, William Blake looked up and saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’. That was at Peckham Rye in south London, on one of his solitary walks. Peter Ackroyd, himself haunted by the spirit of London, doesn’t mention that a mural occupying the whole side of a house there, to commemorate the event, was painted in 1993, only to be vandalised three years later.