After decades on the naughty step, “Frankenfoods” are making a comeback.

There are two “duelling visions” of how the West should handle Russia, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, and they’ve been neatly articulated by a pair of “notable nonagenarians” this week at Davos. Veteran investor George Soros, 91, sees global politics as a “struggle between democracy and totalitarianism”. Democracies are duty-bound to treat their citizens with respect and conduct themselves abroad “under the restraints of international law”. Foreign policy grandee Henry Kissinger, 99, takes the less ideological, more pragmatic view that there will always be “many types of government” in the world, and that America’s job is simply to “create and defend a balance of power”.

Villain
Harry Styles, for being a poor man’s Mick Jagger, according to Mick Jagger. “I used to wear a lot more eye make-up than him,” Jagger told The Sunday Times. “Come on, I was much more androgynous. And he doesn’t have a voice like mine or move on stage like me.” There is, at least, one saving grace for Styles: he “has a superficial resemblance to my younger self, which is fine – he can’t help that”.

“The urge to snoop is as old as time,” says Brian Hochman in Wired. Catherine de’ Medici, for example, installed specially designed ventilation ducts at the Louvre so she could listen in on anyone plotting against her. Archaeologists have unearthed “acoustical arrangements like these” dating back to 3000 BC. But it wasn’t until the 1940s that the invention of tiny electronic transistors made secret bugs good enough, and small enough, to become a serious tool for nosy spooks. These microphones, “smaller than sugar cubes and thinner than postage stamps”, could be secreted anywhere: from wall sockets and picture frames to packs of cigarettes, shirt buttons, lipstick tubes and lighters.

McDonald’s every day of his life”, says Emily Heil in The Washington Post. He stuck to his word: Gorske, now 68, recently celebrated 50 years of eating at least one Big Mac nearly every day. Since 1972, the former prison guard has munched his way through 32,943 of the burgers. “Some days, he eats two.” He has twice been recognised by Guinness World Records for his feat, and his picture hangs on the wall at his local McDonald’s in Wisconsin.

When the Queen came to visit my boarding school in the 1960s, I was banished to the sanatorium, says AN Wilson in The Sunday Telegraph. She was there to open some new gates, but before her arrival I had written an article for the school newspaper urging her “to open public schools to all” instead. The piece was picked up by several newspapers. One headline thundered: “Public School Red insults the Queen”. So, “frightened that Her Majesty would somehow be seen anywhere near the lefty teenage AN”, the teachers locked me up until she’d been driven back to London.