All of us living in today's world are facing an enormous crisis - arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced - in the form of man-made global warming; one can't be neutral at such a moment. It's like claiming to be neutral if you're living in Germany in 1933.

I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.

The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country's injustices and contradictions down on paper. Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

I can certainly sympathize with writers who don't want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.