not the usual pieties

William Skidelsky writes that a recurring theme in some new collections of short stories is climate change:

A masterclass in this respect is offered by Helen Simpson's The Tipping Point, the wry internal monologue of an English professor who, while driving to give a seminar in the Highlands, remembers an affair he had with a German environmental activist. It's a brilliant, subtle piece of writing that manages to subvert the usual pieties, recasting the concerns of the activist girlfriend as hysterically unreasonable ('You were in a constant state of alarm. I wanted you to talk about me, about you and me, but the apocalyptic zeitgeist intruded').