When I met Michael Cohen in New York two years ago, he was a man visibly crushed by what life had done to him. His whole face sagged: he could have defined the word ‘hangdog’, a beagle caught peeing on the Persian rug. We stood outside his apartment building, which was Trump Park Avenue, Trump’s name bearing down on Cohen’s head in gold letters three feet high. We’d already had a long lunch and I was trying to say goodbye but as he spoke about one injustice or humiliation he remembered another, a torrent of self-pity.

Six years ago, at the celebratory opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely football star emerged. The red team’s ageing, six-foot tall centre-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal; a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he expected to become his country’s 12th president.

Earlier this summer left-wing activists announced a ‘semi-autonomous zone’ in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. Denuded of law enforcement and any other signs of the American state, these activists deluded themselves that they were creating a blueprint for the perfect society. After a number of wholly predictable murders and rather more rapes, the state retook control. The area where the state formerly known as CHAZ briefly stood is now just another homeless encampment, overlooked by empty luxury apartments.

Some believe that All Hallows’ Eve is adopted from a much older Celtic holiday, Samhain, that marked the change from harvest’s living richness to the darkness of winter. In its modern guise, Halloween still retains something of that pagan philosophy — a time when the borders between the living and the spirit world are supposed to be at their weakest. For our pre-Christian ancestors, this sense of the in-between was felt not only in the mulchy decay of autumn but also in the land around them.