What are words worth?

It's one of those things that looms in your mind as you approach the city. If you've grown up reading Cold War spy novels it figures larger than life, mystery on either side and danger in the middle. You recall stories of people building tunnels and finding ways across No Man's Land hiding in improbable ways. And then you see the ghost of a wall on a bright summer day, nothing more than a double row of dark bricks that make a discontinuous line along the middle of a wide Linden-lined avenue. Achala and I go hunting for Checkpoint Charlie, deciding to walk the 5 miles there instead of taking the faster-but-to-our-tourist-minds-more-complicated subway route. Despite faithfully following a map, we fail to make a couple of turns and end up a couple of miles off, and too tired to retrace our steps. We meet a couple who respond to our English with a Nordic smile and point to their watches to indicate it would take us an hour at least to get there. So we leave it for another da...

We had just been let off by the taxi at the corner of the block in the Prezelauer district of Berlin where my friend Elfriede lives. Dragging our 20-kilo loads along, my daughter and I trudge along the street toward her house. I have my eyes on the sidewalk and almost bump into a tree trunk—and look up to find it’s not. In the roughly carved recesses of what was once a tree, are bookshelves, the books inside protected by curved glass that could be opened with a push. No locks and no latches. The books look well thumbed and put there by caring hands, not just discarded after a quick read. Later, Elfriede explains it to us. People in the neighbourhood drop off books they have read and would like to share.   Others pick them up, or just leaf through them while sitting at the café next door, sometimes leaving another book in exchange.   Charming idea. A lovely woman I meet at dinner later in the week tells me that if she finishes a book while she’s...