Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

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.