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.

The next time you’re delayed for hours at an airport, or bumped off your flight and made to wait for 24 hours, spare a thought for Ahmad Khan.  In the late 18th century, he set off as part of the entourage of three high-born sons of the deceased nawab (Muslim governor) of Broach (now Bharuch) in India, heading to London.

Those who hold that death is the permanent cessation of consciousness divide into opposing camps. On the one side are the petrified, for whom the prospect of the void induces an electric terror. On the other are those who fear untimely death, but cannot get worked up about the fact that life will end.

It is probably unfashionable these days to ascribe a particular artistic ability to an entire nation, but if you have ever enjoyed a written correspondence with Japanese friends, you will have noticed how often they begin doodling and illustrating in the middle of their sentences.

When Marco Polo visited China in the late thirteenth century, he reported that Hangzhou was “the greatest city that is or ever was in the world”, and that the revenue of the Great Khan from the salt tax was “greater than that of any Christian king”.

The future of the Arctic seems more uncertain than ever. New and resurgent political actors are undermining the security and safety of the region, while climate change is dismantling long-held assumptions about permanence and predictability.

The history of the European overseas empires – Spanish, French, British and other – is often presented as one of initial conquest and colonization, followed by the slow erosion of imperial rule, then its eventual displacement by newly independent states.

Ten years after the last video recorder manufacturer ceased production, the first straight-to-video movie for two decades – This Is How the World Ends – was released this month. The resurgence of vinyl began long ago; sales are at their highest level for over 30 years.

Every so often we are reminded of how many familiar expressions in our daily talk derive from Shakespeare or the King James Bible of 1611. We may not quite live in a world where a Bertie Wooster-type can rattle off verses from the more obscure psalms without a second thought, thanks to an expensive and not very practical education.

Gladys Hynes (1888–1958) was an erratic radical. The ‘grandchild of a Fenian’, she believed fully in Ireland’s struggle for independence, befriended its main players and declared her intention to join Sinn Féin. But in Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives by Sacha Llewellyn, Sean Mark and Jennifer FitzGerald, the artist can also seem curiously absent-minded about her cause.