Выбрать главу

Mr Zuma himself once faced corruption charges, escaping trial by the skin of his teeth on a legal technicality.

Was the ball over the goal-line? (Note to German readers: maybe not at Wembley in 1966, yes in Bloemfontein in 2010.) Was that sending-off de­served, or a gross miscarriage of justice? Was the referee brilliant, blind or bribed?

International Criminal Court has no gumshoes or handcuffs of its own — members must help to bring in the accused.

The lord's right to make the peasants, after working all day, sit up and whip the ponds all night with boughs, to prevent the frogs'music from disturbing my lord's slumbers.

Instead of finding a needle in the haystack, they are making more.

If not the land of the free, America is certainly the land of the ingenious lawyer.

£ £ Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children

According to myth, Eros carried arrows tipped either in gold or in lead: the gold ones incited extreme desire; the lead ones killed it.

Why are adult men in India so eager to have their wives breast­feed them?

Male prisoners look for bits of wire to make weapons and stab each other, she says. "Women look for wire to curl their eyelashes."

When Mr Trump divorced the first of his three wives, Ivana, he let the New York tabloids know that one reason for the separation was that her breast implants felt all wrong.

Egypt was once at the forefront of contraception. In ancient times wo­men inserted a paste made with crocodile dung into their vaginas to pre­vent pregnancy.

Never give money to an online paramour, however charming.

Be nice to your kids — they choose your nursing home.

Some results are both disturbing and perplexing, such as the pre­valence of searches on pornographic sites for videos depicting sexual violence against women, and the fact that women them­selves seek out these scenes at least twice as often as men do.

A common myth in Sudan is that an uncut clitoris will grow into a third leg.

If diamonds were to cease being a way to signal a man's mar­riageability, what might take their place?

In Egypt and Palestine, over half of men and women say that if a woman is raped, she should marry her rapist. In at least three of the countries, more women than men say that women who dress provocatively de­serve to be harassed.

In the 1920s even respectable ladies began painting their faces, and the cosmetics industry exploded.

Children are said to have "six pockets": two from their parents, and four from their grandparents.

A lioness may mate up to 100 times a day with different lions dur­ing oestrus.

Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty of fish in the sea, yet many are unhygienic, self-absorbed, disconcertingly attached to ex- fish, or fans of Donald Trump. In a sense, searching for a mate is not so different from hunting for a job.

Family feuds are discouraged when no relative can dream of run­ning off to Bahamas with all the loot. "There are no family fights," says one Wallenberg. "No one understands how it works, but it works well".

If you can't find love change your appearance.

Peacocks strut; bowerbirds build lovenests; spiders gift-wrap flies in silk. Such courtship rituals play an important role in what Charles Darwin called sexual selection: when the female of a species bears most of the costs of reproduction, males use extravagant displays and gifts to demonstrate their "reproduc­tive fitness" and females choose between them. For human males, shards of a crystalline form of carbon often feature. A diamond engagement ring signals a man's taste, wealth and commitment, all to persuade a woman that he is a good bet.

De Beers can no longer control the market. Though it is the biggest producer by value, it accounts for only a third of global sales, down from 45% in 2007. Meanwhile the source of the demand that drives sales — the link between diamonds and love — looks weaker than it used to. The ancient Greeks regarded diamonds as the tears of the gods.

Saudi Arabia lavishes cash on suspected terrorists who co­operate with its deradicalisation programme, setting them up with jobs, cars and even wives.

It is a status symbol, demonstrating that even as a man approaches the expenses of married life, he can still splash out on a bauble.

Procter & Gamble roared into the disposable-nappy business with Pampers in 1961.

The progenitor ofJapan's imperial line, supposedly 2,600 years ago, was female: Amaterasu, goddess of the sun. But for most of the time since, all emperors have been male.

Chopsticks come in pairs.

Divorce is still common — more than 800,000 marriages were annulled in 2014 — and it is often costly and protracted. A survey by Nolo, a le­gal publisher, suggests the average American couple spends $15,000 and 10.7 months untying the knot.

A procedure called mitochondrial donation, which would result in a child with DNA from three people: its mother, its father and a female donor sometimes dubbed a mitomum.

How a woman can love a daughter born of rape?

More than 10m Americans are estimated to date digitally, and as an industry in 2013 it reached $2 billion in revenue with over 2,500 dating sites in the United States.

"The best countries", Fourie wrote, "have always been those which allowed women the most freedom."

Love, it turns out, is not innocent hanky-panky, but something

noxious, corrosive — even deadly.

The menopause is a puzzle.

A country's GDP falls when a man marries his maid.

The most important career choice a woman makes is whom she marries. A supportive spouse can help you excel; a jealous or lazy one may hold you back.

In the mid-1800s, before the advent of negatives and half-tone printing, a photo of a naked prostitute cost more than engaging her for sex. Not until 1953, when Hugh Hefner launched Playboy with a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, did porn go mass-market.

When men announce they are about to have a child, they are simply congratulated; when women do, they are congratulated and then asked what they plan to do about work.

50% of marriages end in divorce, the other 50% end in death. So take your pick.

How do robots have sex? By swapping software "genotypes" via infrared communications, ideally when facing each other 30cm apart. Not exact­ly a salty punchline.

Cuttlefish are cross-dressers, the male argonaut (a pelagic octo­pus) has a detachable, projectile penis, dolphins are in flagrante acrobats, and group sex erupts (where else?) on the California coast twice a year when tens of thousands of grunions disport themselves on the beach. Led by the moon and tides, the small fish fling themselves ashore. The female digs a hole in the sand with her tail, backs in, lays eggs, and waits while up to eight males snuggle up and release their sperm.

Loneliness, conversely, can be deadly: one study found it did more dam­age to health than smoking.

Dogs, unlike people, are capable of pure love — at least according to Freud.

Britain leads the rich world in indicators associated with solitary life­styles: gym-going (as opposed to team sports), divorce, smartphone and tablet adoption (replacing the family television set), self-employment, online shopping, eating alone, meal-skipping and the declines of both the pub and the nuclear family. Clubs of all sorts, from churches and political parties to golf clubs and trade unions, are shrinking.

If backward time travel were possible, some fool would no doubt try testing the grandfather paradox, another invention of time- travelling fiction writers. In this, a visitor to the past kills his or her grand-father before the conception of the protagonist's own parent, meaning the protagonist could never have been born, and the murder could not have taken place.