Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Socrates's bugbear was the spread of the biggest-ever innovation in communications – writing. He feared that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls… they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." Enos Hitchcock voiced a widespread concern about the latest publishing fad in 1790. "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth." (There was a related worry that sofas, introduced at the same time, encouraged young people to drift off into fantasy worlds.) Cinema was denounced as "an evil pure and simple" in 1910; comic books were said to lead children into delinquency in 1954; rock'n'roll was accused of turning the young into "devil worshippers" in 1956; Hillary Clinton attacked video games for "stealing the innocence of our children" in 2005.

James Bond films are almost always the same: Bond is sent to an exotic location, meets and seduces a woman, gets caught by the villain, escapes, kills the villain and gets the girl.

Java sparrows are able to distinguish cubist paintings from impressionist and Japanese ones, and that pigeons can tell a Chagall from a Van Gogh, as well as discriminating between the Japanese school and the impressionist.

To build his factory, Mr Fazioli moved from Rome to Sacile, near Venice and, more important, near the Val di Fiemme, known as the "musical forest" for spruce trees yielding especially resonant wood.

This book is a gem, and there are still 91 shopping days till Christmas.

"Terminator: Genisys", a flop in America with $90m in takings on a $155m production budget, was a blockbuster overseas, earning $351m, including $113m in China. Even if big names like these have lost some of their lustre at home, abroad they can be "sort of like supernovas", the studio executive says. "They have flamed out a long time ago but the light shines on past their death."

Unable to reach any conclusion about what art is, he turns instead to what it is not. There are plenty of things that are not works of art: for example, human excrement. Probably. But what about Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist who died in 1963 after creating an "edition" of 90 tin cans each containing 30 grams of his own excrement? The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery and the Pompidou Centre snapped them up. More fool them, you say. Others would agree, but they would be no closer to defining what art is.

Albert Einstein, a huge fan of Bach's, advised others to "listen, play, love, revere – and keep your mouth shut."

Do orchestral conductors do anything useful?