“... with a discussion of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted from a P.D. James novel, set in a near-future Britain of caged refugees and cheap euthanasia, a world in which no children have been born for a generation. As Fisher says, this dystopia extrapolates only a little: I watched the film myself the other day to check I’d ...”

“... as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot down. Then there was the dream I had in which a snatched photo of the Trump-puff briefing notes of the former White House press secretary ...”

“... talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Tony Curtis shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first ...”

“... Hard SF fuelled both the Cold War space race and Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ dream. As Adam Curtis showed in the BBC series Pandora’s Box (1992), the notion of defensive missiles in space was whispered into the cowboy actor’s ear by two leading conservative Hard SF writers of the 1980s, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.‘Extrapolation’ may be a ...”