“The most popular Nobel literature laureate, Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, has reportedly laid down his pen. We’ve been here before: in 1974, the year after the Chilean coup, he vowed not to pick up his writing tools until General Pinochet fell, though thankfully, by the 1980s he was back at his desk. Yet the octogenarian writer, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) has sold more than 30m copies, has long been at pains to pass on his mantle.”