Ten links for you

1. The Vatican's Latinist: "I saw him for an hour in Rome in 1985 and that one hour completely changed my life." And many other people's lives too, it seems.

2. The Fox's Prophecy. And pretty prophetic it is too. "Taught wisdom by disaster, // England shall learn to know // That trade is not the only gain // Heaven gives to man below": there's Brexit and Indyref2 in one stanza from 1871.

3. Computer games vs the Game of Life. "In May 2016 he finished his graduate-school training in business law. A few months later, he decided he didn’t want to work in law after all; he wanted to play video games. ... During his studies, he could only spare a couple of hours each day for his habit. Now he can slip into his video-game worlds for five or six hours at a time. A law career would have meant more money. Yet it would also have meant much more time spent at law." Trade-offs, you see.

4. Semper sic tyrannis? "If, however, it turns out that the intelligence agencies have indeed been actively collaborating with the White House in working against opposition politicians, the whole tale assumes a particularly dangerous aspect as there is no real mechanism in place to prevent that from occurring again. The tool that Obama has placed in Trump’s hands might just as easily be used against the Democrats in 2020."

5. "One precious thing about ordinary readers is that sometimes they develop feelings for the characters. This is something critics never discuss. Which is a shame. The Anglo-Saxon critics do good plot summaries but they don’t talk about the characters either. Readers, however, do it uninhibitedly." Houellebecq. In my view, it is nearly always worth reading interviews with boxers or Michel Houellebecq.

6. "I don’t understand why we look down on people who vote against their own interests. ... putting the good of the country ahead of your own pocketbook? I salute you, my noble friend, and wish you had a less idiotic idea of what’s good for the country." That's from this chap, here.

7. A couple of links about the capitalist world we live in: why are the French so miserable? and how to save capitalism,

8. Malcolm Gladwell on leaks. There's quite a few things going on in this piece to do with the changing of the generations, game theory, technology and the law and more besides.

9. What Robert Kelly himself has to say about that BBC interview.

10. Last but not least, a funny and new (well, newly-published) story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.