In ancient China suspected liars were sometimes required to hold rice in their mouths while their alleged misdemeanours were read out. A dry mouth was thought to be a symptom of a guilty conscience, so subsequent examination of the rice offered an easy indication as to innocence or guilt. The idea that lying produces physical symptoms found its modern expression in America in the early 20th century, with the invention of the polygraph, the "lie detector" so beloved of spy films and pulp detective novels.
Demand for lobsters, for example, has evolved in a curious way. The armour-plated delicacy used to be super-abundant and dirt cheap, he says — so cheap that it was fed to inmates in prison and children in orphanages. Farmers even fertilised their fields with it, and servants would bargain with their employers to be given it no more than twice or thrice a week.
Oxfam, an aid agency, warns of a humanitarian disaster, with more than 1m children facing severe malnutrition. Villagers in Chad already dig up ant hills to gather grain the ants have stored.
All that glisters is not gadolinium.
Champagne socialism.
The euphemism now lies buried beneath the rubble of reality.
Starbucks provides a comfortable environment, at considerable expense, so that people will buy overpriced coffee.
The main factor sleparating success and failure of great strategies is luck.
The food was good, but not the mood.
This combination of challenges and opportunities is producing a fizzing cocktail of creativity.
The British have embraced the Liberal Democrats, lampooned not so long ago as gently eccentric granola-eaters and sandal-wearers.
Sparkling wines does not appear to work in stouts.
Useless as a chocolate teapot.
In the world of wine (regarded as an art form by at least some connoisseurs), being told the price of a bottle affects a drinker's appreciation of the liquid in the glass in ways that can be detected by a brain scanner.
Surely you know what a blue-plate is, man? They shove the whole meat at you under your nose, already dished up on your plate — roast turkey, cranberry sauce, sausages and carrots and Grench fried. I can't bear French fried, but there's no pick and choose with a blue-plate.
But one constant would remain through all of this fuss about whether Marmite is vegetarian, or baked beans kosher or halal.
Charles de Gaulle once said that the graveyards are full of indispensable men. The same can be said of the bars of Los Angeles and Paris.
in 1795 Napoleon offered a prize to preserve food for his army, which led to the canned food of today.
Indeed, there are enough sour grapes in these pages to fill an entire vineyard.
If you use a public toilet and it's dirty, clean it, otherwise those who come after you will think you dirtied it.
It takes roughly 3,000 litres of water to grow enough food for one person for one day, or about one litre for each calorie. Don't paint a snake with legs, the Chinese will say, when someone is in danger of spoiling something by overdoing it.
But the last word on Steve Irwin seemed to belong to Africa's greatest crocodile-hunter, Khalid Hassen, bagger of 17,000 crocs the easy way, with a rifle, who said it simply didn't seem right that a fish should have killed him.
"We say it is higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, dearer than eyesight, sweeter than honey, and so on."
Even where there is enough food, people do not seem healthier. On top of 1 billion without enough calories, another 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they lack micro-nutrients (this is often called "hidden hunger"). And a further 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they eat too much and are obese. It is a damning record: out of the world population of 7 billion, 3 billion eat too little, too unhealthily, or too much.
The connection between humour and Jews is so strong as to be almost axiomatic and it as similar to "French cuisine" or "Turkish baths".
George Bernard Shaw once wrote: "There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
In his "Autobiography John Stuart Mill argued that the best way to attain happiness is not to make happiness your "direct end", but to fix your mind on something else. Happiness is the incidental by-product of pursuing some other worthy goal.
Around 15,400 tonnes a year, a whopping 80% of all antibiotics sold, go to farmers. Chicken farmers use even more than those who raise cattle or pigs. Only a small percentage of the drugs are used to cure illnesses.
Women aged 25-44 spend almost as much time shopping as they do eating and drinking.
You never expected Nelson Mandela or Gandhi to dress smartly.
£ £ Government, politics, democracy, society
If politicians were recyclable, they'd be worth less than cardboard.
Many moons ago Lyndon Johnson was widely quoted as justifying his unwillingness to sack J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, on the ground that "it's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in".
"If you look into the crystal ball," says an experienced pollster, "you've got to be ready to eat ground glass." Some put Hillary Clinton's chance of victory against Mr Trump above 99%.
One quick question: do you know what a mugwump is?
Was the American Revolution not a civil war within the British empire?
The first rule of politics: don't kick your most faithful voters in the teeth for no reason.
Nobody reads party manifestos.
A figure of between 100 and 200 acquaintances is similar to the number of people with whom a human being can maintain a meaningful social relationship — a value known as Dunbar's number, after Robin Dunbar, the psychologist who proposed it. Dunbar's number for people is about 150.
This has encouraged a notion that the nominees are as bad as each other — Hillary and Trump are Coke and Pepsi, both bad for you.
The proportion of Britons telling pollsters that they almost never trust the government has risen from one in ten in 1986 to one in three today.
A more open, accessible imperial family has transformed the monarchy's appeal after the aloofness of Hirohito — even if it will be a while yet before the royals bicycle to the supermarket like Scandinavian ones.
Imagine an American election in which two-thirds of the senators and three-quarters of the state governors up for re-election are defeated. It would be a landside to end all landslides.
The whole purpose of having a drawbridge is that one can raise or lower it as necessary depending upon the situation at hand. A proper castle requires a sensible fellow at the controls.
Donald Rumsfeld, a former American defence secretary, once delighted policy wonks everywhere by distinguishing between "known unknowns" — things we know we don't know — and "unknown unknowns". China's political system is a known unknown.
"When the end of the world is nigh," Otto von Bismarck allegedly said, "I will move to Mecklenburg, because everything happens 50 years later there." Even locals agree that the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg — West Pomerania will always be a backwater. But backwaters can also be bellwethers.
It feels as if Britain has been visited by a battalion of sorrows.
When Richard Nixon got cross with Gough Whitlam, the independent-minded Australian prime minister at the time, he put Australia on his "shit list".
There is a saying in Japan that a monkey that falls from a tree is still a monkey, but a member of parliament who falls is a nobody.
Some legal scholars have, rather valiantly, cited as precedent Benjamin Franklin's seeking Congress's approval before accepting a jewel-encrusted snuffbox from the king of France as a retirement gift.
America already spends $19bn a year on immigration enforcement, more than on the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Drug Enforcement Agency and Secret Service combined.
The farther you live from a railway station, the more you are likely to vote FN (National Front).