The media commentators who cite Łobaczewski would have us believe that leaders like Trump and Johnson are progressively weeding out the healthy from their cabinets until only pathological cronies remain. But did Trump fall out with Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, John Bolton and Anthony Scaramucci because they were wholesome?

Translation is more than just carrying a text from language to language; it’s also a passage from audience to audience. To its Greek listeners, the Iliad didn’t need footnotes or endnotes. It wasn’t ‘literature’ or a status marker for taste and education. It was popular entertainment, put on at boozy gatherings by MCs whose talent could get them free drinks. That mood is hard to recapture now, even if a translator’s philology is faultless.

What we don’t know about Joan of Arc could fill a server farm. Yet the basic facts of her life are simple enough that they’ve continuously inspired children’s books. A teenage peasant who never held a formal position of power, she is more famous today than the French king she fought for or the English king she opposed. (Charles VII, to us, is simply the king who met Joan.) She has spawned movies, plays, fashion lines, advertisements and 1920s flapper hairstyles. Christians, feminists, transgender activists, neopagans, leftists, the French Resistance and Marine Le Pen supporters have all revered (and repurposed) her story.

The grandfather of all Aryan race theorists was French aristocrat Count Arthur de Gobineau. In 1853, he published a 1400-page tome, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, promising to diagnose ‘the mortal disease of civilizations’ and explain how societies collapsed. He began, sensibly enough, by ruling out declining morals; the canker was not ‘fanaticism’, ‘luxury’ or ‘irreligion’.

Ebola’s been one of pop culture’s favourite doomsday scenarios for decades. Thanks to Hollywood, everyone has a vivid idea of what an outbreak ought to look like. It starts with a poor sod – our ‘Patient Zero’ – who hops on a connecting flight and spreads the bug around the world. More and more people contract it, shrieking horribly as their organs are liquefied. Soon, most of humanity is finished.

At first the scandal seemed fairly familiar: another Salafist demagogue getting into shit over comments about women, even if defending honour killings was a new low. Except there was something different this time. Badar wasn’t a brassy gym-jock imam like Sheik Feiz Muhammad but a crisply dressed, swottish macroeconomics tutor.

Rebecca Solnit is the Thomas Friedman of America’s liberal Left: a queasily bad writer stuck in a 90s parallel universe who isn’t great with reality but practiced at milking the stretched udder of metaphor. Friedman gave us The World is Flat. Solnit’s new work is The Faraway Nearby.

Late last year, a think tank called the Australian Security Research Centre (ASRC), whose staff includes former members of ASIO and the US Department of Defense, announced a new short story competition called ‘Australia’s Security Nightmares’, inviting ordinary-ish Aussies to submit terrorist plans as pieces of fiction. The competition’s goal, according to the editor’s preface by Dr Athol Yates, was ‘to produce a set of short stories that contribute to a better conception of possible future threats and help defence, intelligence services, emergency managers, health agencies … [et al.] to be better prepared’.

Eileen Jones – who is most famous for her iconoclastic, working-class brand of film criticism at The eXiled – has just put out Filmsuck, USA, a new collection of writing in ebook form, with a long introductory section that hopes to explain precisely why America’s cinema is in decline. Her thesis is an interesting one: the inventiveness that at one time made Hollywood the ‘dream factory’ of the world came largely from the American working class, and neither studio nor independent filmmaking has gained much since by divorcing itself from the plebs.