At the start of a new year, when we traditionally burden ourselves with “bossy, unrealistic” resolutions, says India Knight in The Sunday Times, it’s refreshing to hear Michelle Obama talk about the “grinding slog” of marriage. For 10 years, she said in a recent TV interview, “I couldn’t stand my husband”. Specifically, when their children were young – “little kids, they’re terrorists” – and she felt Barack wasn’t pulling his weight. But “marriage isn’t 50-50, ever”, she explained – and because they stuck it out during that rocky period, rather than “give up”, they have now been married (mostly) happily for 30 years. How right she is. Marriage isn’t just “skipping about among the flowers”, just as parenting is “sometimes boring and hard”. That’s fine – it’s how normal life works. “Like a wonky carrot, it doesn’t need binning because it’s imperfect.”

“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” That aphorism, variously attributed to Winston Churchill, US president John Adams, or King Oscar II of Sweden, underscores a “well-established rule”, says John Burn-Murdoch in the FT: “as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative”. This pattern has held “remarkably firm” across Britain’s successive generations – until now. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are following a much more left-wing trajectory than their predecessors. Previous generations would, at age 35, be around five percentage points less conservative than the national average. For millennials, it’s more like 15 points.