Pompeii continues to fascinate. But saying "continues" is, of course, a terrible elision. It was. It went under. Then it was rediscovered and, like all rediscoveries, reinvented to suit our purposes. Mary Beard revisits both the city and its (re)creation in a meticulous and captivating book which, though probably designed to tie in with the film of Robert Harris's novel (currently in abeyance), stands brilliantly on its own.

I'm tempted [...]

The brand survives undamaged; even the sexual revisionists have failed to tarnish it. We, the consumers, make our own choice and Giacomo Casanova inspires loyalty. Leave him alone. The boy done good. Astonishing reach, too. Here is the Birmingham University Medical School yearbook 2008, filled with newly minted doctors. What a handsome, happy, diligent and optimistic lot they are. Makes you proud to be human. And here is Dr R [...]

Interesting that the Hayward Gallery should celebrate its 40th anniversary with an exhibition of street posters from the Paris rebellion of May 1968. Presumably we're expected to see some sort of political or aesthetic or spiritual link between the Hayward and the Paris students and workers. Tricky. As tricky as the invariable alliance of students-and-workers in the Sixties. A bit unpersuasive, too, given that one of the reasons for becoming [...]

David Levy's thesis, in this utterly fascinating, scholarly and rather uncomfortable book, is essentially that we'll fuck anything (which we knew), and that we love pretty much anything that looks as though it might love us; or, at least, is blank and malleable enough for us to project that idea upon. Levy proposes that, by 2025 or so, apparently responsive artificial partners will be available for roughly $20,000; and that [...]

Poor Gissing. If a life were measured by how much it was a warning to others, he would be one of history's successes. There was nothing glamorous about his failure, and most of the world couldn't even see it. But Gissing could see it (though the shape his failure took in his imagination varied) and the result was a sort of tragic crippling of his life. "The story of his [...]

Andrew Robinson's book is the intellectual biography of Thomas Young, "the anonymous polymath who proved Newton wrong, explained how we see, cured the sick, and deciphered the Rosetta Stone" - to quote the delightful, if hyperbolic, subtitle. But before we get on to its hyperbole, our hackles are already up, bristling at the word "polymath".

We don't like polymaths any more. Perhaps it's because even being a monomath is too [...]

If we want an image to sum up the spirit of the age, it would be this: a middle-aged man playing air guitar. A mime; a simulacrum; a declaration of unearned, shared identity; a banner of fake democracy; a determined declaration of youthfulness indefinitely prolonged. The air guitar is the Baby Boomers' swastika, their marching banner; the Boomers, now growing old, are running the show; and they are making big [...]

Martin Kemp, professor of art history at Oxford and curator of the "Leonardo: experience, experiment and design" exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, must be a happy man - secure in the prospect of popular triumph. Nobody can doubt that the vast, and inexplicable, success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code will swell the visitor numbers. Animations of Leonardo's drawings and models of his great weapons [...]

It is the one. Win the Nobel Prize - for peace, physics, chemistry, economic sciences, physiology or medicine, or literature - and nobody is going to say "it was rigged", or "it doesn't count", or "so, you sold out". The worst they might say (particularly of the literature prize) is: "Who?"

The Nobel lacks the taint of corporate money and branding - no mobile telephones, or whatever it is that [...]

Lillian "Diamond Lil" Aubrey leads the Young@Heart line-up on the chorus's website. She is renowned, we are assured, for her solos: "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy", "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" and other popster hits of the Baby Boom generation.

Diamond Lil is no Boomer. When she was a teenager, there weren't any teenagers. When she was 16, it was Al Jolson singing "Swannee"; she would have celebrated her 21st [...]