Sam Leith

Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable 'great man' theory of history. As he argued in his short biography of Winston Churchill, Churchill was a living refutation of the notion that great men and women are just 'meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history', a 'withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference'. Boris’s own downfall is a magnificent demonstration – though perhaps not of the sort he would have hoped for – that he was onto something. Character does make a difference. It wasn’t 'events, dear boy, events' that did for him – though heaven knows he was rocked by a few of those.

I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had vague memories of his grinning, chipmunk-like face getting up to antics with Gordon the Gopher in the 1990s. I noticed when he was in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, because that was all over the papers. Occasionally I’d see a clip of him on breakfast telly. And then there was the thing where he came out as gay – which seemed to merit an Alan Partridge shrug – and the thing with the Queen’s funeral, which, again, was hard to get worked up about.

When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster that I’d seen advertised in a comic. It depicted Superman, whom I held in high regard, scragging a distinctly second-tier villain called Nick O’Teen; the relic of some lame early-eighties anti-smoking campaign. For reasons I can’t now fathom, I burned to have this on my bedroom wall. I remember it now not because of the poster, but because the wait for it to arrive. 'Allow eight weeks for delivery', it said. And it really did take eight weeks to show up – which, when you’re nine and you really, really want a Superman poster, might as well be a lifetime.  The very idea of waiting that long for anything, now, will be incomprehensible to a nine-year-old.

Over the next few days, people will be reaching for certain set phrases about Martin Amis. That he was ‘era-defining’ (though he defined more than one era); that he was ‘genre-defying’ (he defied more than one genre); that he was an ‘enfant terrible’ (it will be wryly noted that he remained an enfant terrible, somehow, into his eighth decade). It's poignant, I think, that a writer who vigilantly waged the career-long battle he called ‘the war against cliché’ will go to his grave heaped with the garlands of the old enemy.  Still, he deserves the content of those tributes if not their form. And it’s not much of a surprise that nobody can write as well about Martin Amis as, in life, he could write about anything else.

Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the 40-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine – regarded as the leading publication for brain-imaging research in the world. The board, whose members include very senior figures in the world of brain science, is protesting what it sees as the publisher Elsevier’s greedy and unethical behaviour.   Objecting to this grotesque situation shouldn’t be an ideological issue.

If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel Worlds, Kaku combines the scientific chops of the theoretical physics professor he is with the gee-wow wonder of a sci-fi geek. That’s apt for someone who grew up worshipping at the twin altars of Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon. ‘It all started when I was eight,’ he says. ‘All the newspapers said that a great scientist had died. And they said that on his desk was a manuscript that he could not finish. I was fascinated by that.