If you – dear reader – would like to have more serenity regarding the currently apparently hysterical world or zeitgeist, you could try Terry Pratchett’s novels to enrich your perspective with some humour. There are numerous little observations in these multi-faceted social pictures that make us think. For example, on Discworld there are so-called iconographs. These are small, black boxes through which, with a viewfinder, you look at a motif; you press a button and a picture of exactly that motif comes out of the box. A miracle of magic. But one should not open this box carelessly. You...

Sometimes I find myself, rather by chance – if I believed in such a thing – in places whose names I am quite familiar with, because I have encountered them before in various contexts, without being able to visualise their significance. Wetzlar is such a place. Hardly would I have found it easily on the map, but I soon realised why I knew the name. After all, the town was the seat of the Imperial Chamber Court from 1689 to 1806, where Goethe, probably on the instructions of his father, was to give his legal career a decisive boost...