Sam Leith

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.

The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it untouched by death threats, disinformation and the baleful influence of Vladimir Putin’s troll farms? What if there was still some corner of the world wide web which lived up to its original promise of connecting people who would not otherwise be connected, and what if once connected they were nothing but agreeable to each other? Be of good cheer. That corner exists. Not everyone is arguing with Owen Jones and India Willoughby.

Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster. It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about A petition urging the BBC to drop its projected series Grenfell has had more than 50,000 signatures, and there’s anger too at a play being prepared for the National Theatre by the writer Gillian Slovo. ‘Before you do this sort of thing, you should get our permission, because this is our pain, our story,’ said Maryam Adam, who escaped from the burning tower and later gave evidence to the public inquiry.