A 700-year-old story – Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written and set in Italy at the time of the Black Death – is having its day again. During the Covid pandemic, it became a Twitter trend, a favourite of virtual book clubs, and was hailed as the text “of the moment” by Vogue. This summer, a “soapy period dramedy” adaptation is coming to Netflix, promising to take “viewers back into quarantine”.
President Trump claimed Thursday that China plans to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars” in the companies run by the CEOs he “surprised” Xi Jinping with during their high-stakes meeting....