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

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?

      Alfted Hitchcock, who knew about such things, explained the difference between shock and suspense. Shock is when a bomb suddenly explodes. Suspense is when viewers see a bomb beneath a table where people are peacefully chatting. Shock is seeing the tops of telephone poles and trees poking above roiling waters on one side of the two-lane causeway between Morganza and Batchelor in Louisiana – particularly when the Mississippi River is on the other side of the road. Suspense is imagining where that water will be in a few days.

      Salingerspent ten years writing "The Catcher in the Rye" and "the rest of his life regretting it," observe David Shields and Shane Salerno in a new biography and related documentary.

      Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it," declared Bertolt Brecht.

      Herodotus describes flying snakes, fox-sized ants that unearthed gold dust, men with the heads of dogs and others with no heads at all whose eyes are set in their chests. But, as with reports of the intervention of the gods, he often distances himself by remarking that he is not sure if he can believe what he has been told.

      What price the Louvre, the Parthenon or Yellowstone National Park?

      Imagine a place run by film stars – vain, power-hungry, paranoid, adored. Imagine they had been in charge not for the duration of a reality television series but for decades in a territory containing 72m people and one of the world's largest cities. It would be a disaster zone, wouldn't it?

      Does Cannes need to shock?

      Horace Walpole always regretted the export to Russia of the legendary British art collection, fearing that it would be "burnt in a wooden palace on the first insurrection". But by a twist of fate, the sale saved the paintings. In 1789, ten years after they left, the Picture Gallery at Houghton was destroyed by fire.

      "It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture," observed Thomas Edison in 1913, predicting that books would soon be obsolete in the classroom.

      There is now nothing you can imagine that cannot be shown by Hollywood.

      To judge a painter, you have to wait at least two centuries.

      Such schmaltzy songs as "White Christmas", "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" and "Let it Snow" were all by Jewish musicians.

      The Library of Alexandria – built during the 3rd century BC to house the accumulated knowledge of centuries – reputedly had a copy (often the only copy) of every book in the world at the time. It burned to the ground sometime between Julius Caesar's conquest of Egypt in 48BC and the Muslim invasion in 640AD. Some historians believe the loss of the Alexandrian library, along with the dissolution of its huge community of scribes and scholars, created the conditions for the Dark Ages that descended across Europe as the Roman empire crumbled from within. A millennium of misery ensued, with ignorance and poverty the rule until the Renaissance dawned.

      Paul Newman's blue eyes: cornflower blue, steel blue or ice blue?

      "What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?" asked Adolf Hitler in 1940.

      "Avatar", an enjoyable nonsense art.

      No one in Hollywood cared what Emmanuelle wore, as long as she removed it. Her long, willowy body was rented out, to become the fantasy possession of thousands of devoted men. But her price was too high, and they would never have her.

      Americans would sooner unplug their refrigerators than their cable boxes.

      If Greece represented the first day in art, then these carved tusks and sculpted stones mark the dazzling light of its "early morning".

      Last September the Boston Museum of Fine Arts bowed to public pressure and returned the top half of an 1,800-year-old statue called "Weary Herakles", which came from southern Turkey. Left to the museum by an American couple, its documented provenance went back no more than 30 years, which suggests it was looted, probably in the late 1970s. Mr Erdogan himself brought this trophy back to Turkey, reuniting the head and torso with the statue's bottom half.

      A classical scholar at Winchester College and at Oxford, Frank Thompson was proficient in nine languages and a voracious reader. (He read "War and Peace" many times, once in Italian.)

      "I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers," Mahatma Gandhi once said.

      Britain exports around 3 % of the world's goods and 6 % of the world's services, but the country's artists account for around 13 % of global music sales.

      A sense of comedy is never far off. "Mount Sepsick! Mount Spittelboom!" cries the wicked brother in another story, groping for the magic words that will open the cave. "Mount Siccapillydircus!" he tries again in desperation.

      Some may have been sudoku, tredoku or futoshiki freaks, who buy daily newspapers, extract the puzzle pages and throw away the rest.

      Forgers nowadays typically favour 20th-century abstract and expressionist styles. Mimicking Jackson Pollock's drip-and-splatter paintings is easier than faking old masters such as Rembrandt. Swamped with lawsuits, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation stopped authenticating works in 1996, four decades after Pollock's death. Lawsuits continued anyway. A court even entertained a suit from a man with a painting signed "Pollack".

      A publicist who specializes in selling sauce to the tabloids.

      Dante's complicated ABA, BCB, CDC, DED.

      Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species produces