Each year, about ten people in Britain die from allergic reactions to food. The case of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died after eating a sandwich from Pret a Manger, was a nasty reminder of how allergies can claim young lives at any moment. But it also raises a difficult question: to what extent are businesses that serve food culpable? Why do so many people, after this case, want to blame Pret and only Pret? It’s territory with which I am familiar, as a mother of two children with severe allergies.

As someone who spent three decades working closely with intelligence services in the Arab world and the West, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife. A one-time regime insider turned critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the de facto head of the Saudi kingdom which tolerates no criticism whatsoever — Khashoggi had been living in Washington for the previous year in self-imposed exile amid a crackdown on independent voices in his homeland.

So farewell, then, to the Common Entrance Exam, bane of a million schoolchildren’s lives since it was introduced in 1904. Three of the biggest public schools — St Paul’s, Wellington College and Westminster — are giving up the exam. From 2021, they will do the pre-test: verbal and non-verbal reasoning, maths and English, taken at the age of ten and 11. Common Entrance was a more gruelling thing, involving up to 14 exams over three days.

When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of bad taste. It’s a far cry from the home bar’s 1950s heyday. After the second world war, people were spending more time at home, but still wanted to lead the cocktail lifestyle.