Abroad in Japan is a simple enough account of Chris Broad’s decade living in Japan. What sets it apart from similar books is the affection and respect Broad clearly has for his adopted home. He avoids the default position many foreign commentators take when talking about the Japanese, the “they’re weird and wonderful” or “they’re impossible to understand” attitude that I’ve always found to be so patronizing and superficial. Broad has deep affection for the country and its people, has worked to learn the language and customs, and has put down deep roots. This is no travelogue, but a funny love letter to a country he has explored from top to bottom.

I have made 20-30 visits to Japan over the years and I have grown to love the country. I would never pretend to understand or know it well, because it’s a place that demands and repays deep immersion, but I enjoy returning there more than any other place I have visited. Some of that is down to its sights, its food, and its customs, but mostly it’s about the Japanese people – their kindness, hospitality, curiosity, and warmth.

I found reading Roman Stories a discomfiting experience and I think that is exactly what Jhumpa Lahiri wanted. The people in these stories find themselves in episodes of crisis, isolation, or disorientation. An expatriate woman waiting for surgery, an immigrant child minder forced to live in a different continent from her young son, another immigrant forced out of his home by his neighbors’ racist hatred, a lonely widow trying to make sense of a city transformed since her childhood. Everyone is sad, uncomfortable, angry, or alone. Rome, the author’s adopted home in recent times, is the setting for all the stories, and it’s not the Rome the tourists see. It’s a city in decline, a place scarred by graffiti and garbage, where the immigrants are mistreated and those born and raised there are uneasy and alienated.

There are powerful and poignant stories here (I liked The Procession especially), but I finished the collection feeling that many failed to make the impact the author intended. For me short stories require a sharpness of focus and a precision of expression. Something is lost in this most exacting of genres if the lens roams too freely. I wanted less, but the author always seemed to want to give more.

When Michelangelo moved to Rome from Florence in 1534 he was nearly 60 years old. He would have been considered an old man by the standards of the time. (Average life expectancy was around 70 years). He was to live another three decades, decades that saw him produce some of his most remarkable work. An exhibition at the British Museum, Michelangelo: The Last Decades, chronicles and celebrates this period. It’s not to be missed and, by the looks of the long lines outside the museum at opening time this morning, many agree with me.

The number and scale of the commissions he accepted in those decades would have daunted even a younger person. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be his patron, and he found it difficult to refuse the various popes and noblemen offering him architectural and painting work. Little wonder that he took to preparing outlines and sketches that were finished by lesser artists. The magnificent drawings, mostly completed in chalk on paper, are the heart of this small exhibition, and looking at them close-up it’s hardly surprising that his contemporaries marveled at this “divinely inspired” talents. Anyone whose experience of Michelangelo has been confined until now to his vast frescos or monumental sculptures ought to beat a path to the British Museum and marvel at these wondrous drawings.

There is quite a long list of “literary giants” whose work I have never read. From time to time I make resolutions to shorten the list, to read even just one work of a celebrated writer I have so far overlooked, and plug a hole in my ignorance. A planned family visit to Lisbon (that never happened) led me to the shelves in Daunt Books in Marylebone set aside for books by Portuguese writers, and it was there I spotted Saramago. Other than the fact that he came from Portugal and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I knew nothing about him. There must have been some uncertainty at work in the back of my mind because I chose a small volume of reminiscences, leaving on the shelves the longer (and reputedly challenging) novels. With the planned trip abandoned, I put Small Memories aside for a few weeks. It’s a simple collection of reminiscences from Saramago’s childhood in Azinhaga and Lisbon in the 1920s and 1930s, told directly and without affectation. There is such warmth in his recollection of incidents and experiences, and of family and school friends, and such vividness in his retelling of the unexceptional events of his early life. Saramago’s boyhood was one of poverty and simplicity, but there is no trace of bitterness or self-pity to be found in Small Memories. I can’t say it made me want to delve further into his work, but I enjoyed every page of this short, touching memoir.