Looking back at the latter part of 2025, I find I’ve kept company with four writers who have little in common save this: they address the reader as a friend might, seriously but without hauteur, concerned with how we conduct ourselves in difficult times.

Danilo Kiš bears witness to individual lives crushed by historical machinery, holding fast to the particular against the statistical. Albert Camus, that Mediterranean moralist, insists on solidarity and clear-eyed lucidity especially in the face of the absurd. Plutarch offers us character through narrative, the texture of lived experience rather than abstract virtue. And Thomas De Quincey, with his magnificent rolling periods and confessional intensity, transforms autobiography into something approaching the universal.

They move between the intimate and the vast without losing their footing. There is spaciousness in all four, even when treating the darkest material. De Quincey knew something of the mystery of darkness, yet writes with extraordinary generosity toward his reader, inviting us into his labyrinthine sentences as if into a confidence between intimates.

These four write as if they know the reader has also faced morning light after sleepless nights and wondered how to proceed. Fellow travellers, then. Moralists, concerned with how to live, how to face difficulty with dignity, how to hold onto what matters against impersonal forces.