If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage it, pay for it, perhaps even make it compulsory. They certainly would not stand in its way. A relentless stream of data from around the world is showing that e-cigarettes are robbing tobacco companies of today’s customers — and cancer wards of their future patients.

The bishopric of Bath and Wells comes with more bear-traps than most. For one thing, there’s the baby-eating. Ever since Blackadder told Baldrick he was being chased for a debt by the ‘baby--eating Bishop of Bath and Wells’, the image has stuck. When the last incumbent, Peter Price, made his first visit to the House of Lords, accompanied by his five-week-old granddaughter, the Bishop of Southwark remarked: ‘I see the bishop has brought his own lunch.

 New York City An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse.

My mother always said she wanted to ‘die tidy’. But I never imagined she would file everything away quite so neatly as she did. One drawer in her desk was given over to travel. It included a little Hermès box containing a leather docket given to her by Hotel-Du-Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes after she and my father spent their honeymoon there in 1950. It was a passport to the hotel, allowing them to go as day guests whenever they wanted for the rest of their lives.