Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

In an attempt to avoid the infernal heat and the rhythmic maracas-style racket of the cicadas in the trees, I have become nocturnal. I go to bed at 7 a.m. and get up at 4 p.m.

This may seem wrong, a sign of moral failure or mental breakdown, but let me remind you that the wise men bearing gifts did the same. As Longfellow writes: ‘And they travelled by night and they slept by day,/ For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star.’

It is that moment in the night before the cock-crow hour, and the silence is more or less total, apart from the stirrings of the sea a mile or so across the fields. I sit at my work station looking out from the wide-open window of my so-called study at the star-spangled sky above me and the lights of the gas rig known as Angiolina on the horizon.

We are heading for a Boriswave disaster

Lois McLatchie Miller

The classless response to Ann Widdecombe’s murder

Thomas Tuchel has done the impossible: he’s made me love the Germans

I lower my gaze to the glass of red wine next to my laptop and notice a beautiful green grasshopper has attached itself to the rim. I gently prise the grasshopper off with a forefinger and thumb and toss it out of the window. Then I take a swig of the wine: Chianti Superiore from Lidl at €3.99 a bottle. I am allowed to drink during the World Cup and am making the most........

© The Spectator