Intermittently through the year, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I like to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope. “Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which we are our own gods,” he wrote, “because Hope is a solemn duty which we owe alike to ourselves and the world.”

Shelley had a Promethean vision which seemed to his age, as it must certainly seem to ours, wholly unattainable – a vision of men and women,…..