Before long they were swapping sonnets. They chose a phrase, the harmless South German greeting ‘Grüß Gott’, to express their secret closeness when they were in company. For them it meant: ‘I am touching you’.

David Constantine, Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation; from ‘Bertolt Brecht and Margarete Steffin: Love in a Time of Exile and War’

Eric Sloane

Coal miner's child using a hole in the door to enter a bedroom with a smoking pipe in one hand and a gun in the other in Bertha Hill, West Virginia. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. 1938

On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in the first game of a six-game match - the first time a computer had ever beaten a human in a formal chess game.

Where are my heroes? Where are you, my children? Where are my own, the curious ones, the first, the original ones? Name me, muse, the immortal singer who, abandoned by those who listened to him, lost his voice. He who, from the angel of poetry that he was, became a poet, ignored or mocked outside on the threshold of no-man's land.

Satirists, be careful. In the 1931 film by Rene Clair “Vive la Liberte” a song says, “Work is freedom.” In 1940 the sign on the gates to Auschwitz said: “Arbeit macht frei.

Italian girl in Adrian helmet, fur coat, and with a Vetterli Vitali rifle with bayonet during World War One.

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?

- Gustave Le Bon