Joan Warden of Stapleford, Cambridgeshire, when charged in 1592 with being a cunning woman, declared that 'she doth not use any charms, but that she doth use ointments and herbs to cure many diseases'.

Sir Felix, when he read this letter at his club in the afternoon of the Monday, turned up his nose and shook his head. He thought if there were much of that kind of thing to be done, he could not go on with it, even though the marriage was certain, and the money secure. What an infernal little ass! he said to himself as he crumpled the letter up.

The chorus of radio and television, the slow build of plasma image and newspaper and magazine photograph, the rising leafstorm of banners and newsflashes not only made any error impossible to rectify, they made errors the truth, …

But even as you read this, some sharp political phrasemaker is working on a paragraph that begins “Not in a hundred days, not in a hundred hours, but in a hundred New York minutes .