This week, I’ve been with Elena Ferrante in Naples, travelling The Silk Roads with Peter Frankopan, before that in Cicero’s Rome with Robert Harris, with Curtis Sittenfeld and Laura Bush in American Wife, with David Crane and Robert Falcon Scott to the Antarctic, with Rohinton Mistry to the India of A Fine Balance, with Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries to New Zealand’s wild west coast of 1865. No other medium, so inexpensive and accessible, takes me across time, to places undreamed of. I read and write to explore why people do what they do, the consequences, the great mysteries of human existence.