Our language is riddled with the vocabulary of games, carried over and applied to our wider experience. What do we do when the ball is in our court? We have to respond. This is the basic human situation. Life seems to turn to us and say, 'Your move, I think.'

Idris Parry, Professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Manchester, reflects on Herman Hesse's famous novel The Glass Bead Game, recently published in a new translation by Richard and Clara Winston: originally published in German in 1943. Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.