Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were surprised to be told that the excruciatingly introverted German-language instructor they had been avoiding in the corridors for several years was ‘the greatest living poet in the German language’.

The history of the working class has held a perennial fascination for the British left, which becomes particularly intense when the Labour Party is in one of its perennial crises.

The story of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is so often a story of decorum, of what can and what can’t be written or said (and in front of whom). At the start of 1928, at the Swiss Alpine resort of Les Diablerets, where Aldous Huxley and his Belgian wife, Maria, were staying with Julian and Juliette Huxley and the D. H. Lawrences, Maria had been given the task of typing up the manuscript of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The year 1979 is the one of the seminal dates in modern political history. As one looks back over the last century of Middle Eastern history, it is more and more clear that the Islamic Revolution ranks with the French and Russian revolutions in its significance, not just to the region but also to the world.

The title of this book immediately evokes the Arab Bureau’s impossibly colourful employees, among whom Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert would certainly have been the most obscure, especially as compared to his half-brother George, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who funded the expedition that found the tomb of Tutankhamun, had he not been offered the throne of Albania. Twice.

What do these things have to do with one another? They are examples of the traditions, beliefs and practices of “the folk”, and hence are folklore, a category without any obvious further circumscription. In Folklore, Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook, two folklore studies academics, choose not to put many limits on their subject, other than geographical ones.

It was 1796. Revolutionary France was as much at war with itself as it was with nations beyond its borders, the Ottoman Empire was manoeuvring uneasily in response to new geopolitical pressures and, in India, the East India Company was tightening its grip, even as its nightmares were haunted by the formidable ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, whose summer palace proudly displayed a mechanical tiger that growled as it mauled a European soldier caught in its powerful claws.

Early​ in the first notebook of Jane Austen’s teenage writings is a work entitled ‘Jack and Alice: a novel’; it runs to a little over 5500 words and was probably written between 1789 and 1791.

“I’m England till I die. I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m England till I die!” Sandra Forsyth was almost 50 when she found her voice marching across Tower Bridge with several hundred supporters of the English Defence League. “Have you spoken to Mum lately?” her son Billy wrote to his sister Nicola from prison. “She’s turned into a fascist, lols.”

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt  could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.