Entering the world of Bond

in The Times. “And in my experience, those who are confused are the observers.” Most people with dementia only become confused if you correct them, he says – which is “almost always a mistake. Don’t tell them that the person they’re talking about happily actually died 20 years ago! For what? They die again for them!” People should ask themselves why they feel the need to correct their loved ones with dementia. “It’s for yourself, because you want that person to be what they were.”

When Lashana Lynch was cast as 007 in the new James Bond film, it caused quite a stir. Though she only plays an agent who has been given the hero’s number, critics said the very fact that a black woman had been given the role showed the franchise was hostage to “political correctness”. She wasn’t altogether surprised. “White patriarchy will always have something to say when it comes to things like that,” she told Thomas Barrie in GQ. “But the magnitude of it was ridiculous.” What she found more frustrating was the sense that her casting was a societal achievement. She’s tired, she says, of “the fact that you have to celebrate it, like it’s this New Age thing, like black people just arrived on the planet”. For black people, the news that, say, Idris Elba had been cast as the new Bond would be “really big”, she says. But as for everyone else, “I need you not to care about it.”

Alexei Navalny has been a thorn in the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin for so long that interviewers used often to ask him why he hadn’t been killed yet. Then he nearly was: in August, the opposition activist collapsed on board a flight from Siberia to Moscow. Tests later confirmed that he had been poisoned with Novichok – but Navalny had known he was dying as soon as the nerve agent started to take effect. His first symptom was a loss of focus, combined with a terrifying sense of incomprehension. It was a feeling worse than pain, he told Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. “I’ve compared it to being touched by a Dementor in a Harry Potter novel – you feel that life is leaving you.” The disruption to the nervous system was so extreme, it felt as though every cell in his body was “going berserk”. Emerging from the plane’s bathroom, “I saw my seat and realised I would probably never make it that far. So I informed the flight attendant that I was about to die, right there on their plane, and I lay down.” Twentysix days later, he woke up from his coma at a clinic in Berlin, and his slow recovery began. Novichok, he says, is “a thing from hell... intended solely for making people die a painful death”. He is still far from well; but he insists that he will go back to Russia. “Of course I’m going back. If I don’t, that will be the ideal outcome for them.”