Beyond Words is a festival of literature organised by the French Institute in South Kensington in London,

from the 8th to the 22nd of June, bringing together writers from across the French-speaking world

and beyond, from Beirut to Kamchatka, whose work is reaching new audiences in English.

The festival features talks, readings and films, and the line-up includes the

anthropologist, Natasia Martin, the novelists Saus Chalendon, Camille de Peretti and Ben Faccini,

the BBC correspondent Fergal Keen, the crime writers, Olivier Norick, Abia Mukherjee and Joseph

Incardonnais, and the writers and football enthusiasts, Valentin de D'Dont and

Philippe O'Clair. Join them and others at Beyond Words at the French Institute in June.

One of my favourite English expressions is to talk of someone missing the wood for the trees.

And it's a special risk for people who pay close attention to politics,

that you can be so close to the news cycle that, somewhat paradoxically,

you miss the larger scale changes behind individual events

and eventually find yourself completely politically lost.

Politics across Europe has hardly lacked dramatic change over the past

couple of decades. Often these have prompted commentary in the form of puzzlement. How could Britain

vote to leave the European Union? How could post-Soviet states vote for strongmen? How could

post-fascist parties so easily launder their reputations?

How has socialism made a comeback? And why aren't people just sensible or rational?

Sometimes the many-headed conceptual hydra of populism is invoked as an explanation for this,

especially as many parties set themselves up as the

representatives of the real, the only real people. Most often there is some anxiety behind

these questions, anxiety about the difficulty of sustaining democratic politics in an increasingly

...