Sam Kinchin-Smith

The bay of Elefsina, the modern name for ancient Eleusis, is a graveyard for ships named after gods and nymphs. 

What happens when you accidentally write a perfect song? You get a measly slice of the pie, is one answer – but also, possibly, the last laugh. That seems to be what’s happened to the Walkmen: the authors, though not exactly the beneficiaries, of the New York garage rock revival’s best song.

Earlier this year, two ice cores 125 metres long were drilled out of the Holtedahlfonna icefield and flown to the Ice Memory Sanctuary in Antarctica, so that climatic history can still be traced through Svalbard’s glaciers even after they’ve disappeared completely.

A pulsating display of white lights combines with a warmly manipulative techno soundscape and the natural rhythms of your brain to create a psychedelic, hypnagogic vision of patterns and colours that is truly subjective: ‘It’s almost as if the brain is looking at itself,’ according to the neuroscientist Anil Seth, a collaborator on the project.

A Hitch in Time, a new collection of Christopher Hitchens’s previously unanthologised pieces for the LRB, will be published by Atlantic Books on Thursday (you can order it from the London Review Bookshop now). He kept an eye on his most ghoulish compatriots – Diana Mosley was the ‘worst and not the least bright of the “Bright Young Things”: with a vile mind and a gorgeous carapace, and with a maddening class confidence allied to a tiny, repetitive tic of fanaticism’ – but the sharpest spikes in the index come after four American names: Clinton, William ‘Bill’; Kissinger, Henry; Nixon, Richard; and, out in front if you count Joe, Bobby and Jackie O. too, Kennedy.