Donald Trump is playing hemispheric monopoly. Depending on what day of the week it is, the President’s focus alternates between Venezuela, Canada, the Panama canal – and for the last twelve months or so, Greenland.

It’s been 25 years since I started working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting human rights on the internet. I’ve found myself in dozens of countries working with activists, politicians and civil servants to untangle the complex technical questions raised by the internet, and every one of our discussions ended in the same place.

When, in the early 1950s, Birds Eye tested a new frozen fish product for the British market, the cod fish finger was only ever intended as a bland control option. The experiment’s star prototype was the “Herring Savoury” – a breaded herring fillet, marketed with the slogan “No bones, no waste, no smell, no fuss”.

From every point of view, the present circumstances of Europe’s leading powers seem grave. This is true of the business outlook, politics, security threats and – though it is better placed than many – the region’s preparedness for the coming technological transformations.

My father, a playwright, says that his choice of profession can be parsed as humbly as considering the impulse of a child to showboat on a bicycle screaming, “Look at me!” towards a distracted mother.

A rum lot, the Mitfords. Head of the clan, Lord Redesdale, was chairman of the House of Lords’ Drains Committee and kept a pet mongoose.

As more and more people become aware of the catastrophe that is Brexit, with – as I reported last time – even former chancellor George Osborne suggesting re-entry to the customs union, the dilatory nature of the government’s “realignment” efforts is becoming embarrassing.

In 2025, the world that had been opened up by women has often seemed to be closing in. The forces behind the rollback of abortion rights in Donald Trump’s US are attempting to do the same in the UK. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has doubled down on its attacks on women and girls.

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,” he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.”

In 1920, the young Finnish architect Alvar Alto flew over Helsinki for the first time. He was aghast. ‘An aviator can see where the monkeys have been and destroyed so very much,’ he recalled. Alto’s aerial view reflected a story of fragmentation and occupation spanning some five centuries, now surveyed by the historian Henrik Meinander.