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“... In a few weeks, all going well, I will get to see my Polish file. Any foreign journalist who visited Poland regularly in the Communist period must assume that the old Security Service built up a dossier on him or her. Mine is now in the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and I can read it. I don’t know what it contains. Much irrelevant rubbish, no doubt: surveillance teams have to justify their expenses ...”

“... The mycological turn’ is a phrase coined ‘half-jokingly’ by Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon in an essay published last year in Critical Inquiry. It refers to ‘an enthusiasm for fungi in the various registers of engineering, business, art, medicine and wellness, and popular culture’: a fascination with the material properties of these strange organisms that tips into a sort of messianism, a forlorn hope that fungi may ‘save the world’, or at least live on ‘in capitalist ruins’, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote ten years ago in The Mushroom at the End of the World ...”