The author of this memoir thought he was walking the Camino alone until, on the evening of the 4th of September 2017, a clairvoyant hospitelera told him someone was walking with him. It’s the son who killed himself 26 years earlier. After this revelation the pilgrimage to Santiago becomes a walk into a mirror: the further they walk onwards together, the deeper they return to the past. In this way their family’s bohemian life is laid unsparingly bare until, at journey’s end, at Finisterre, ...

Human memory is not a flawless video recorder; it is a highly suggestible, pattern-seeking engine that is incredibly easy to hack. The most elegant and terrifying proof of this is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Paradigm. In this psychological experiment, a researcher reads a list of related words: "bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, blanket." Later, when asked to recall the list, the vast majority of subjects will confidently swear they heard the word "sleep." They did not. The brain's se...

Sean Connery's personification of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. But while Bond would make Connery the first actor to command a million dollar-plus fee, the man himself was forever pouring scorn on the fantasies audiences found it increasingly hard to separate him from.Spirited, argumentative and sardonically celebratory, Christopher Bray's ...