It’s a far cry from the sun-kissed beaches of Cape Town where she grew up, but the simple pleasures of a seaside village in Cornwall draw the author back year after year

The idea of the sea that I grew up with was associated with sundowners and souped-up cars and skipping classes to sunbathe with the models who took over Cape Town’s beaches each summer. As a student, long nights would end, not infrequently, with a swim at sunrise (until, one morning, the police arrived to remind us that sharks feed at dawn). So it’s hardly surprising that, after moving to Norwich to study in my 20s, the British seaside trips I made felt tepid. Cromer, with its swathe of beige sand sloping into water an almost identical colour, seemed to suggest that over here, land and sea were really not that different from one another. That the sea as I’d known it – with all its ecstatic, annihilating energy – was an unruly part of the Earth whose existence was best disavowed.

It was only several years later, burnt out from a soul-destroying job, that I took a week off and boarded a train to Cornwall. I was 25, poor and suffering from the kind of gastric complaints that often accompany misery. With a pair of shorts, two T-shirts and a raincoat in my backpack, I arrived in St Ives and set off to walk the Cornish coastal path.

From stealing a photo for the King of Bohemia to battling the Napoleon of crime on a clifftop, Holmes is witty and watchable in these early Conan Doyle-approved dramas

The British Film Institute has restored three of the short two-reel silent films in the Stoll Pictures Sherlock Holmes series from the early 1920s – and very witty, watchable and spirited entertainments they are too. The star is the English stage actor Eille Norwood , whose handsome, troubled, sensitive face looms out of the screen in extreme closeup in the first of these, A Scandal in Bohemia, from 1921. Dr Watson is played in all of the films by Hubert Willis.

In this first film, our hero demonstrates his talents as a master of disguise; Holmes is approached by the King of Bohemia at his rooms in Baker Street, wearing a mask (so concerned is he about being recognised), although Holmes’s powers of deduction (and of course his own superior mastery of this kind of imposture) allow him to rumble the king at once. He wants Holmes to purloin an incriminating photograph taken of him with a young woman – an “adventuress” is how he quaintly puts it – which could be embarrassing. This is the fashionable stage actor Irene Adler, played by Joan Beverley, and Holmes manages to get on stage with Adler mid-performance to carry out a daring stratagem. But very startlingly, Adler appears to be the one person who can outwit Holmes.

The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change

Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.

It’s a far cry from the sun-kissed beaches of Cape Town where she grew up, but the simple pleasures of a seaside village in Cornwall draw the author back year after year

The idea of the sea that I grew up with was associated with sundowners and souped-up cars and skipping classes to sunbathe with the models who took over Cape Town’s beaches each summer. As a student, long nights would end, not infrequently, with a swim at sunrise (until, one morning, the police arrived to remind us that sharks feed at dawn). So it’s hardly surprising that, after moving to Norwich to study in my 20s, the British seaside trips I made felt tepid. Cromer, with its swathe of beige sand sloping into water an almost identical colour, seemed to suggest that over here, land and sea were really not that different from one another. That the sea as I’d known it – with all its ecstatic, annihilating energy – was an unruly part of the Earth whose existence was best disavowed.

It was only several years later, burnt out from a soul-destroying job, that I took a week off and boarded a train to Cornwall. I was 25, poor and suffering from the kind of gastric complaints that often accompany misery. With a pair of shorts, two T-shirts and a raincoat in my backpack, I arrived in St Ives and set off to walk the Cornish coastal path.

From stealing a photo for the King of Bohemia to battling the Napoleon of crime on a clifftop, Holmes is witty and watchable in these early Conan Doyle-approved dramas

The British Film Institute has restored three of the short two-reel silent films in the Stoll Pictures Sherlock Holmes series from the early 1920s – and very witty, watchable and spirited entertainments they are too. The star is the English stage actor Eille Norwood , whose handsome, troubled, sensitive face looms out of the screen in extreme closeup in the first of these, A Scandal in Bohemia, from 1921. Dr Watson is played in all of the films by Hubert Willis.

In this first film, our hero demonstrates his talents as a master of disguise; Holmes is approached by the King of Bohemia at his rooms in Baker Street, wearing a mask (so concerned is he about being recognised), although Holmes’s powers of deduction (and of course his own superior mastery of this kind of imposture) allow him to rumble the king at once. He wants Holmes to purloin an incriminating photograph taken of him with a young woman – an “adventuress” is how he quaintly puts it – which could be embarrassing. This is the fashionable stage actor Irene Adler, played by Joan Beverley, and Holmes manages to get on stage with Adler mid-performance to carry out a daring stratagem. But very startlingly, Adler appears to be the one person who can outwit Holmes.

The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change

Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.

I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, but the sound of a child brought me out of my trance, and showed me how important it is to look outwards in a crisis

The moment I knew I was about to die came a couple of years into my 20s, when life was really just starting out. My best friend, Helen, and I were on our way to Blackburn to catch up with an old university friend who had recently moved there for work. Thrilled to see each other, and basking in the prospect of the party weekend ahead, we chatted nonstop as we made our way by train from York.

We stashed our bags – full of essentials such as bottles of wine and my new pair of black clogs – above our heads and settled down in a cosy two-seater. About 50 minutes into our journey, I was dimly aware of a bang. Then came another, this time impossible to ignore. A woman screamed as our carriage was thrown up into the air in what felt like slow motion. Suddenly, Helen and I were somehow on our feet in the middle of the aisle, hugging each other. Head down, eyes screwed shut, I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, as I’d seen in films. I remember thinking about our families and friends getting the news. Then I heard the little girl crying.

I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, but the sound of a child brought me out of my trance, and showed me how important it is to look outwards in a crisis

The moment I knew I was about to die came a couple of years into my 20s, when life was really just starting out. My best friend, Helen, and I were on our way to Blackburn to catch up with an old university friend who had recently moved there for work. Thrilled to see each other, and basking in the prospect of the party weekend ahead, we chatted nonstop as we made our way by train from York.

We stashed our bags – full of essentials such as bottles of wine and my new pair of black clogs – above our heads and settled down in a cosy two-seater. About 50 minutes into our journey, I was dimly aware of a bang. Then came another, this time impossible to ignore. A woman screamed as our carriage was thrown up into the air in what felt like slow motion. Suddenly, Helen and I were somehow on our feet in the middle of the aisle, hugging each other. Head down, eyes screwed shut, I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, as I’d seen in films. I remember thinking about our families and friends getting the news. Then I heard the little girl crying.

I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, but the sound of a child brought me out of my trance, and showed me how important it is to look outwards in a crisis

The moment I knew I was about to die came a couple of years into my 20s, when life was really just starting out. My best friend, Helen, and I were on our way to Blackburn to catch up with an old university friend who had recently moved there for work. Thrilled to see each other, and basking in the prospect of the party weekend ahead, we chatted nonstop as we made our way by train from York.

We stashed our bags – full of essentials such as bottles of wine and my new pair of black clogs – above our heads and settled down in a cosy two-seater. About 50 minutes into our journey, I was dimly aware of a bang. Then came another, this time impossible to ignore. A woman screamed as our carriage was thrown up into the air in what felt like slow motion. Suddenly, Helen and I were somehow on our feet in the middle of the aisle, hugging each other. Head down, eyes screwed shut, I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, as I’d seen in films. I remember thinking about our families and friends getting the news. Then I heard the little girl crying.