An old mate and I were yacking the other day about the urgency, sometimes, to turn off the assault on the senses that is the daily news; in particular, the endless stream of madness issuing from the United States of America, the claptrap of its president and the embarrassing fawning of the lickspittles gathered around him.

We got talking about the sanctuaries we seek for respite.

My favoured escape is to re-read old books that got my youthful imagination racing: The Great Gatsby , anything by John Steinbeck, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe ...

The death of Robert Redford led us to reminisce about a couple of Redford’s old movies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the near-perfect con-trick caper The Sting . Perfectly escapist pleasu

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