The word “snafu” originated as a US military acronym in the Second World War standing for “situation normal: all fouled (or f*****) up”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it was originally “an expression conveying the common soldier’s laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors”.

In his prophetic 2012 book, Coming Apart, my friend Charles Murray identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s presidential election.

This is a representative sample of the things said by members of the American elite about last week’s Republican national convention in Cleveland. Ignore it all. Their sneering is just irrelevant noise. The signal was what mattered and, though it was loud (and at times monotonous), it was also very clear.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure,” Enoch Powell observed. Tony Blair and David Cameron know only too well what he meant, but whose failure was worse? To judge by Britain’s press last week, the answer is clear.

China may interpret the Biden administration's abandonment of Afghanistan as a "signal that they probably won't fight over anything," historian Niall Ferguson warns.

When I was a little boy, my mother liked to quote the following quatrain (sometimes attributed to the New York wit Dorothy Parker): “See the happy moron, / He doesn’t give a damn, / I wish I were a moron, / My God! Perhaps I am!”

The powerful women of the 1970s and 1980s — Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher — were iron ladies, famous (metaphorically speaking) for having more cojones than the average male politician. By contrast, the female leaders of our time are not just female; they are also feminine.

It is easy to forget — as we celebrate The Donald’s masterful decision to repeal presidential term limits by executive order — that it was only by a series of flukes that Mr Trump became president in the first place.

The prime minister is neatly repositioning Britain alongside the world’s rising power, just as the US did 40 years ago.