Maeve Binchy shares a typically warm and good-humoured account of a first date. We hear of a profound life-changing experience from the writer and social philosopher Charles Handy. Henry Ford’s dream of ‘a motor car for the great multitude’ and Martin Luther King’s dream of freedom and justice for his people are pondered as the reader is taken on a journey of threshold moments that invigorate and inspire.

Beginning. It offers a large enough canvas: the beginning of wisdom, of love, of learning, of memory; the seed of an idea; the foundation of a career; the root of a dream; choices made; roads taken – and not taken; and lessons learned.