This extraordinary work of fiction concludes with the narrator, Haya Tedeschi, reflecting on all she has compiled in eight long years of research and remembering. "I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences... I have dug up all the graves of imagination and longing... I have rummaged through a stored series of certainties without finding a trace of logic." It is the inscrutable incoherence of this phenomenal trajectory of events, hurtling through the recapitulation of three generations of one family from the Second World War to the present, that endows the story with a unique drive and veracity.

Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) named a new cabinet yesterday with the aim of easing rivalries between regional factions and setting the country on a path to democracy ahead of elections next year.

One thing I got wrong in trying to answer The Big Question in The Independent this morning, was to say that "one of the most surprising" names on the leaked BNP membership list was that of someone who stood as a Green Party candidate in the 2001 and 2005 elections.

Poles to open Communist files

The Foreign Office says it was wrong in claiming that a Swiss official had admitted the country was holding $500m in Nazi gold at the end of the Second World War. It said the figure ought to have have been 500 million Swiss francs.

The Swiss inquiry into Nazi gold which was scheduled to start in the spring will now start in January after the government used a legal loophole to speed the process.

Making an early bid for the tournament's most bizarre public statement is a certain Alfredo Poge, the president of the hitherto little-known International Federation of Football History and Statistics.

Nazi war criminal gets off

The historical alarm clock of the 17th century seems to have had something wrong with it. So many of its greatest figures, in England at least, seem only to have woken to their true vocation when life was well into its afternoon. Cromwell is the m ost obvious example, both as soldier and statesman. What about Milton, turning to epic poetry in what was then old age? Hobbes is surely the supreme example. His masterpiece, in a branch of study that he had not even entered until he was middle-aged, bur st onthe world virtually unheralded, when he was 63.

IN LAST Sunday's Review ('Voting for an island state'), it was reported that Anti-Nazi League leaflets carrying the words 'fuck off Beackon Nazis' were pushed through letter- boxes in the Isle of Dogs. We now accept that there was no evidence for this statement, which arose from a misunderstanding of local complaints about similar slogans appearing on road surfaces. We apologise for the error.

. . .I feel (very slightly) embarrassed by you since you became a Communist. Not that I am in the slightest bit opposed to the Communists*. Not at all. But I suppose I have always found those that I have known to be excessively governed by their faith even with regard to their friendships. So I am scared to appear useless to a Communist or sometimes even, if I may so express it - dangerous.

Yang Xianzhen, scholar, died Peking 25 August, aged 97. A prominent Marxist scholar, he served as director of the Marxism-Leninism Institute and its successor, the Higher Party School, before being named as a 'counter-revolutionary revisionist' in 1966.

In an article on Brecht's collaborators (24 May) I included a remark by Eric Bentley, 'We were all Marxists', which I took to be a verbatim quotation. Mr Bentley tells me that it is not. My apologies.