Politics, graft, war, sport and scandal are aired in turn, but the ambassador fails to ambass — the worker fails to work — the messenger makes a mess of it.

Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.

The NASA Kepler spacecraft data revealed a large number of multimode nonradially pulsating gamma Dor and delta Sct variable star candidates.