Alastair Kirk stopped going to school when he was 11. He is now 20, and not exactly a dropout — he went on being educated at home, sitting down every day to work through booklets of maths, english, science, history, geography, all couched in a unique style. ”Here are examples of interrogative sentences,” states one booklet in the curriculum he used, Accelerated Christian Education.

On October 10 it will be 100 years since Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, determined to win the battle for the vote. Just 15 years later, British women had the suffrage for which they had shouted and sung and starved and marched. But there is one country left where women are still engaged in that struggle.

Hillary Rodham Clinton must have known that the attention given to her new book would centre not on her own development as a politician but on her relationship with her husband.