As a teenager I found a book by Elizabeth Hand called the Aestival Tide. It was a bizarre and terrifying vision of the future, blighted by nuclear disaster and man’s own monstrosity; a book that I couldn’t forget although I never found anything else by Hand … until now that is, writes Lynley Donnelly.

Cyril Ramaphosa is the candidate most suitable to become the next president of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman said on Tuesday. Suzman, an MP for more than three decades — much of that time as the only voice in Parliament against the apartheid — was speaking a day before her 90th birthday on Wednesday.

The end of the world didn’t bother Michael Stipe much, but three authors beg to differ. In new novels by Max Brooks, Garth Nix and Sarah Hall, the apocalypse — or a close facsimile thereof — has come and gone, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces.

Given how little we know about William Shakespeare’s life, an awful lot has been written on the subject. Of course the plays and poems produce a seemingly endless amount of commentary and interpretation and reinterpretation, but the hard facts of his life are few and far between. As Bill Bryson writes: ”Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an ­academic obsession.”