"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."

"In a plural world, such as ours – a place in which today you will bump into people who think exactly the opposite to you, on everything from the taste of Marmite to the veracity of God – it is easy to value constancy....Be like a rock, or the northern star: unchanging.

"Carpe Diem helps you do something new everyday. A series of daily do's. The kind of little do's that get our imaginations going, make some memories and get us learning a bit more about ourselves & the world around us.