In the best of times volumes of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats and Neruda crowd the bed. But when Man’s worser nature presses in close, I find myself quoting the often swiftly dismissed Kipling : “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you … Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating…”