I went last night to the dinner celebrating the Ondaatje Prize, now in its fifteenth year: a good prize ‘for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place’, won in the past by Rory Stewart, Adam Nicolson and Edmund de Waal. This year the subjects were mostly global. It was won by Aida Edemariam for her book The Wife’s Tale about her Ethiopian grandmother.