Alexievich was not interested in conventional responses, the kind of thing people say to journalists when they are shy, afraid of controversy or anxious to please.

The words scream off the page, producing an onslaught of images which the reader must piece together into some kind of ghastly jigsaw. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. For the whole of the first month I was there they just dumped the amputated arms and legs of our soldiers and officers, even their bodies, right next to the tents. He didn’t admit he wasn’t on leave, that he’d asked to be let out of hospital for a couple of days to see his mother. Usually I’d have been really pleased – I’d have kissed them – but this time they just made me wonder how much longer I was going to have to wait for him.

The first time we went there they issued us with nine rounds; the second time we all got to throw a grenade. I stood still, calming myself away from a panic attack, and then I tried cycling again, as if to continue with my planned route. There is a pinprick of hope as the soldier remembers his mother but it wanes when we hear wounded comrades cry in their delirium: “Home! A soldier finds a wounded child whose arm is almost severed but when he tries to help her “she bolts, screaming, with her little arm dangling loose, about to fall off”. The Chalke History Festival announces a new name, new look, and tons for history buffs to get their teeth into!

It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I had not got married and had no one to look after me. They put me on a freight plane taking a cargo of sweetcorn to Moscow, from there I got a connection to Minsk. In August 2021, her book The Last Witnesses was excluded from the school curriculum in Belarus and her name was removed from the curriculum. I’m sitting in the hotel, thinking: there is something immoral in scrutinizing other people’s courage and the risks they take. Baranovichi was another 100 kilometres and when we got to the airport there it was after working hours and there was nobody about, except for a night watchman in his hut.

a much needed documentation of the human cost and consequences in the former ussr of that misguided intervention whose effects are still with us today. Her books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Chernobyl Prayer in 1999 and Second-hand Time in 2013, both translated into Belarusian.