Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.

I opened the wine with a corkscrew.

It is a medium-sized phasianid: males can weight even 600 grams and are bigger than the females. Moreover, unlike the females, they have ergots on the claws.

At a beautiful garden, full of fruit trees, a feast was spread under a noble banyan, the vice-reine causing the cloth next to her to be allotted to her guests, whom she tended affectionately, gathering and paring fruit, cutting flowers and weaving them for them, and, unlike the Hindoos, freely eating what they handed her.