In Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, a high-powered publisher and politician named Charles Darke quits his posts, regresses to a child-like state, and frolics in the woods like a ten-year-old. It often seems as if the British ruling class has nurtured, and still nurtures, more than its fair share of Charles Darkes. We could all name the Peter Pans of politics today. Less transparent, however, are those figures who do not act like spoilt, entitled kids in the public sphere, but remain privately enslaved to the child within.

Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up last year to help rectify the acute, and long-standing, gender imbalance among authors translated into English, is supported by the University of Warwick. This year, the panel of judges again consisted of Professors Amanda Hopkinson and Susan Bassnett – both eminent translators, and teachers of the art – and myself. 

Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people.

The master of the Southern California police procedural is back.

What a charmer! An irresistible combination of diffidence and confidence, Michael Caine is so much more than Alfie, and this surprising book, his second after a delightful autobiography, is multi-layered, filled with tips for acting, on stage and screen.

The intrepid philosopher Julian Baggini has travelled the world, going to academic conferences, interviewing scores of practicing philosophers from academics to gurus, trying to figure out and pin down – well, just what his book’s title suggests. He is an advocate for the possibilities inherent in a very carefully controlled pluralism: you cannot just pick and mix, for the fruit needs its parent plant to fully flourish. Context is crucial, but so is understanding.

“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century botanist who is one of the characters in Barbara Kingsolver’s eighth novel, could be talking about modern America. In fact she’s referring to the reluctance of the American public to accept Darwin’s evolutionary theories in the 1870s. It’s also a time, post Civil War, when the country is ruptured and “its wounds lie open and ugly”.

Humdinger! This is a totally brilliant idea for an amazing anthology, although the subtitle “Letters that Changed the World” is slightly misleading.

Dip in, dip out, argue, agree and disagree: Living with the Gods is the newest manifestation of a rich multimedia format that keeps on giving, devised by that superb writer and lecturer, Neil MacGregor, sometime director of the British Museum, and his team.