Welsh poets may still sense a bardic responsibility to speak for their communities. The relatively new post of national poet, currently held by Gillian Clarke, arises naturally from that tradition. Happily for the incumbent, it brings none of the royalist freight attached to the English “laureate” brand, but there are other pressing expectations. Academi, which sponsors the post, lists on its website the required skills, including “an ability to communicate, to write well and often, and to have a regular route into the magic that makes verse work”. This is an un-nerving job description – not least, that surely mischievous

When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country’s most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.

One day in June 1974, a novice Israeli politician named Ariel Sharon drove into the northern West Bank. In a field of thistles south of the Palestinian city of Nablus, the short, bulky ex-general joined a hundred young activists from a radical right-wing protest movement who were busily setting up a new settlement. The activists’ aim was to ensure that Israel retained permanent rule of the entire West Bank, in defiance of the policy of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who’d taken office just two days before. Sharon, known for his obsession with maps and topography, had personally chosen the spot