The fifth president of the University of South California was Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid – a rare and excellent example of the internally capitalised surname.

Joseph Barcroft researching chemical weapons at Porton Down:

"On one occasion, one of his female assistants travelled by train from his laboratory in Cambridge carrying a canister of poison gas. The canister began to leak in the compartment. She attached it to a piece of string, hung it out of the window and completed her journey to Porton."

Stanley Lovell researching bombs at the Office of Strategic Services:

"Cats, it was suggested to the OSS, always land on their feet, and will go to any lengths to avoid water. Why not wire a cat up to a bomb, and sling both cat and attached high explosive below to a bomber? When flying over enemy sips, the explosive cat would be released. The cat would be so concerned to avoid landing int he water that it could, it was argued, be virtually certain of guiding the bomb onto the deck of enemy warships. Exerpiments with flying cats soon proved to the supporters of the project that even unattached to high explosive, the cat was likely to become unconscious long before Nazi decks seemed an attractive landing place."

both from A Higher Form of Killing by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman

I was on the Guardian Books Podcast this week talking about comics with Sarah Crown and Rachel Cooke.

"When you live in a place that you know could be destroyed at any time, it changes the way you think."

In May I flew to New Orleans to interview The Dead Weather (Jack White, Alison Mosshart etc.), and the resulting article is in this month's Dazed & Confused, which has MIA on the cover.

Another German interview with me put through Google Translate. I'm described as "the wildest debut of the season", which makes me sound a bit like the flighty daughter of some 1920s aristocrats. Also, here and here are podcasts talking about the book. No idea whether they like it or not.

From a paper by Professor Philip Morrison, given at the Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence Conference in 1973, about the possible conquences of receiving a message from an alien civilisation:

"A message channel cannot open us to the sort of impact which we have often seen in history once contact is opened between two societies at very different levels of advance. There will be absent across space, of course, any military dominance, whether as in Mexico in the sixteenth century when military dominance from the outside was dependent upon a local alliance, or as in the Canary Islands or in Peru where it was fully external. Nor will there be the thrust of any technical economic competition, like that which induced famine among the highly developed Bengal hand weavers, faced with the machine-made cloth of Manchester. At most, we expose ourselves to the dangers or opportunities faced by the Japanese society on two occasions in its history, once when it encountered the enormously strong culture of the T'ang through a very few persons traveling; or in the nineteenth century when the Japanese system changed entirely after what was only a threatened invasion, but a threat which brought out internal strains that were very deep in Japanese society. So I am confident that on this kind of model, which seems to me very plausible, we could imagine the signal to have great impact - but slowly and soberly mediated, transmitted through all those filter devices of scholars who have to interpret and publish a book, and so forth. Note that the total gloss on Greek thought is at least as voluminous as the Greek texts themselves!"

Interview with me on a German website. Again, I've had to use Google Translate to find out what I apparently said. "The categorization is to completely flounder." Profound.

So Boxer, Beetle came out in a German translation earlier this month under the title Flieg, Hitler, Flieg. Why is it out in Germany, Austria and Switzerland before it's out in the UK? No particular reason. I mention it because I've just had a long review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and I'm pleased to say it's a review that really gets the book. (Well, I think it does; although I'm now writing a novel with a German protagonist, I don't actually speak any German, so I've had to use Google Translate. "And yet he succumb especially those who aspire as Erskine nigh hysterical after drift-order systems." Couldn't have put it better myself.)

Interview with me in The Bookseller.

"Until now no concern had been expressed about the possible side-effects of the rejuvenation operations. But on 12 May 1921, the death in London was announced of Alfred Wilson, a wealthy septuagenarian, who had made his money in ship-breaking. This otherwise unremarkable event had aroused interest because some months previously he had gone to Vienna and had undergone the Steinach operation. On his return to London he had felt so well that he booked the Albert Hall in London to deliver a lecture entitled 'How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger'. A little while before the lecture he had visited his doctor and complained of some chest pain. Both doctor and patient agreed that this discomfort was the result of Wilson's new habit of hitting himself on the chest to demonstrate his renewed virility. However, the pain probably came from a coronary artery disease and Wilson dropped dead from a heart attack twelve hours before giving his lecture. At the inquest into the the death it was mentioned that Dr Steinach had charged £700 for the operation."

from The Monkey Gland Affair by David Hamilton

Josef Svoboda "described a scenography for a proposed production of Faust in 1970 with director Alfred Radok, in which a crucial conceptual understanding was that Mephistopheles and Wagner, Faust's student and domestic servant, were one and the same person, and, of course, one and the same actor. The stage box was an empty and seemingly void space, shaped only by huge, very dark brown, barely distinguishable wall surfaces to the back and sides. The stage floor was steeply raked and apparently flagged with stone. A crucial feature of this floor was that beneath the stage were to be fitted felt-covered 'dampers' that could, by the action of the silently operating pistons, be made to press against the under-surface of the stage and render it silent. As Faust prepared his occult pentagram down stage to 'conjure' diabolic forces, the stage would echo with the sound of his and Wagner's footsteps. Wagner, however, would not engage or assist in Faust's conjuring practices; he would turn and make to elave, walking up stage, and his echoing foosteps would be heard. As he reached the farthest limit of the stage he would turn and walk back down the stage in total silent to stand before Faust – everyone in the theatre would know that in that transition of sound from echoing noise to silence he had become Mephistopheles."

from Theatre, Performance and Technology by Christopher Baugh

Paris in the 17th century:

"A politician called Jean-Jacques Rounuard de Villayer, tired of sending servants to deliver messages and money across the expanding city, came up with the idea of a postal service and postboxes began to spring up in the well-heeled parts of town. The first properly run public transport systems had apepared earlier in the century – a carriage for hire by several citizens at once and called a carrosse had been invented by an enterprising carpenter called Nicolas Sauvage in around 1654. By the 1660s, more than twenty or so of these carriages could regularly be found lined up for hire at the church of Saint-Fiacre (they were nicknamed fiacres thereafter) and a decade or so later, following itineraries dvised by the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, for 5 sous, the Parisian could travel in some comfort from the Palais de Luxembourg to the Pont-Neuf to the Louvre and back again."

from Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey

"The Harvard Aesthetes of 1916 were trying to create in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an after-image of Oxford in the 1890s. They read the Yellow Book, they read Casanova's memoirs and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both in French, and Petronius in Latin; they gathered at teatime in one another's rooms, or at punches in the office of the Harvard Monthly; they drank, instead of weak punch, seidels of straight gin topped with a maraschino cherry; they discussed the harmonies of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Church, the essential virtue of prostitution. They had crucifixes in their bedrooms, and ticket stubs from last Saturday's burlesque show at the Old Howard. They wrote, too; dozens of them were prematurely decayed poets, each with his invocation to Antinoüs, his mournful descriptions of Venetian lagoons, his sonnets to a chorus girl in which he addressed her as 'little painted poem of God.' In spite of these beginnings, a few of them became good writer."

from Exile's Return by Malcolm Cowley

"Halfway across the stone bridge I was so struck by the beauty of the view that I sat down on the low wall and gave myself up to contemplation. A similarly extensive view of life was what I lacked. I was still distracted and engrossed by every detail, I could see every hair and pimple on a human face, without seeing the face itself. I had, morever, no experience of anything but ecstasy. I had never known despair or anguish, which I looked on as literary expressions. I had not endured hunger, frustration, illness, or chastity; these were the afflictions of others. I had nothing on my conscience and had never wept except from loneliness, fright, or boredom. How then was I qualified to write? Could I go on treating life as an amusing spectacle, a kind of joke? the only serious emotions I had were connected with my sense of the hideously fleeting passage of my own happiness, of the mortal beauty of everything I saw, of the inexorable progress of my own body to decay and death; but the conclusions to be drawn from these seemed neither original nor profound. I was at last faced with the fact that the only thing bothering me was not having enough money and that all I desired in the literary way was not to be a bore."

from Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco