And so the order went out from the editorial suite on the 51st level: “No more Trump”.  And forty floors below, Stoker pulled up his green eyeshade, moodily pulled his half-written essay on Donald out of the battered Remington, and flung it at the waste paper basket, missing, as always, by a yard. Lolling back in the battered wooden chair which is standard issue to Only Connect scribblers, he surveyed the narrow view, blocked as it was by the soaring tower of Copper House, gl

The family call it “The Birth Certificate”. It is a single page torn out of a red notebook, one of many kept by their ancestor, a doctor in Southsea, England. In them he used to scribble notes about events – April/Engaged…Aug/Married (these in 1885) or any matter which puzzled, amused or inspired him – Geo IV spent his wedding night drunk across the grate. Why? Because he was also trying to earn some money by writing. A doctor in Victorian times had to canvass for patients an

A US President accused of sexual misconduct with an underage girl. In order to distract attention, the President orders a massive aerial bombing attack on a distant foreign country without prior consent from his allies. Of course this preposterous fiction could never happen in real life, but it was exactly this scenario which played out in the film Wag the Dog...

Chocolate has never been more expensive to buy in the UK. Readers from further afield will also notice steep rises in the price of their favourite confectionery. The increases are bigger than you imagine because chocolate manufacturers are fond of shrinkflation. That 200g bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, the UK’s favourite, is now 180g. The sharp rise in the cost of chocolate has caught the attention of the press, but for reasons that are less to do with the fabled “cost of living