When in June 2019 the BBC announced plans to restrict free TV licences to households with at least one person aged over 75 in receipt of Pension Credit, there was of course, an outcry – naturally, the BBC itself copped the blame.

Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived there. As with all the above, historian Ben Wilson suggests in this omnivorous, adventurous and generous history of the city, the death knell of “humankind’s greatest invention” has been tolled since time immemorial – and always too soon.

“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” That was Diski’s response to daughter’s Choe’s observation that if she were buried – a friend had just offered her a spot in a plot she’d bought amid the grandeur of Highgate Cemetery – she’d need a headstone. Cremation and the music would have to be “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, Diski said.

Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection.

A year plagued by Coronavirus is surely a time to dust off a seldom-aired poetic form, the Corona of sonnets, which was first dreamed up – officially, anyway – by the Siena Academy. John Donne used the form to illustrate the circularity of existence and our connection with a creator, later expressed – in poetry – in Eliot's "in my end is my beginning".

Seven Lies is the debut novel of Elizabeth Kay, who under another name works as a commissioning editor in publishing. For how long will she stay in her day job when her pseudonymous moonlighting has already reaped vast rewards? Her thriller emerges to a drumroll.

When the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison died last year, it was a chance to celebrate the remarkable life of a storyteller who shook the literary establishment. Her work, including her debut novel The Bluest Eye, broke radical new ground in depicting African American life.

It was during my first week at Tufts University in America, when I was 17, that I was told by a stranger that I was Jewish. As I left one of the orientation talks, I was approached by a slight young man with short brown hair and intense eyes. He spoke to me in Spanish and introduced himself as Elliot from Mexico.

“I was told we should meet,” he said, beaming. “Because we’re both good-looking, Latin American, and Jewish.”

These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring tranquility, despite the many students and tourists.

This is not a drill. Lock down, evacuation. An active school shooter is on the loose, actually more than one: two or three men in balaclavas with automatic shotguns. But this isn’t a high school or college in the USA – it’s in Somerset, England. A progressive co-ed school, founded in the 1920s, known for its liberal values, its lack of religious affiliation and its privileged pupils. A haven of political correctness. Who would want to attack it?