INEVITABLY, perhaps, I arrive at my last editorial taking stock of my time at Penguin News. I say my time here, but it has at times felt not so much like I’ve passed through Penguin News, but that it has passed through me like a horde of marauding Mongolian plainsmen.

EVERY now and then while trawling through the online newspapers in the Jane Cameron National Archives (and if you haven’t checked them out yet you definitely should) an absolute gem pops up.

SCRABBLING through piles of dusty tomes at the museum book fair a few weeks back I came upon war correspondent Kate Adie’s brilliant autobiography The Kindness of Strangers.

Graham Bound was the founding editor of Penguin News and still writes a monthly column from his home in the UK

This week, the British government published a list of countries whose citizens may visit the UK without facing two weeks of Covid-19 quarantine. That list does not include a single mainland South American country, which at first glance is not surprising, because the disease has taken a dreadful toll on the continent.

ESCAPISM has taken on a fresh meaning in the last three months. Where once it could have meant wilful avoidance of responsibility, Coronavirus has lent it a positive – therapeutic, even – connotation. We are given book and film recommendations with the assurance that they are “pure escapism,” for instance. Anything to mute the white noise of news reports and shut out the blue light of news feeds and logarithmic scales.