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...de-familiarising your perceptions you will reinvigorate your writing. Here are some similar follow-up exercises that you can try when you get time. Try the same exercise on a different, but still familiar, place. You can also try it with familiar characters in your life – describe them in their absence and then take note of the things you didn't recall. Think of the...

...de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic. Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of...

...based upon ethnicity, the right to a ‘place in the sun’ befitting a great power, deep resentments at national weakness and humiliation, and a feeling that Germany was the last bulwark of western civilisation against ‘asiatic’ Bolshevism. In each case, Hitler built on these cultural values, distorted them into their most extreme, radical form, then broke their...