"Half a century since their break-up, the Fab Four grimly reaped to the tiresome two, the Beatles go on. Documentaries and dramas continue to be made, interviews are bigged-up, and last year, as so often, the Beatles made the top 10"

Irving Berlin's life was packed with incident

"Though de Beauvoir and Sartre never tied the knot, their relationship, with its jealousies and enmities and silent rages, looks like the worst kind of marriage"

Jonathan Rée’s history of philosophy is way too long but worth sticking with for the connections it makes across whole networks of thought