"Humans are ridiculous. We’re all pathetic strivers who will fall short. If you can accept that, it’s optimistic, because you can shoot for the moon and know you’re never going to get there, and that’s OK."

"Whether British citizens will retain their right to freedom of movement after Brexit is still unclear, but Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit coordinator, has said he will try to persuade EU leaders for that to be the case."

"I don’t even care if the guy was belligerent, what the public saw was him dripping blood, trapped in an enclosed space mumbling that he wanted to go home. Flying has become increasingly unpleasant and this is more than a PR crisis, this amounts to anti-branding."

At least 20 people have been killed in what is believed to have been a suicide car bomb attack targeting a convoy of evacuees waiting to enter Aleppo, according to reports.

"Rattling sabres is a particularly dangerous thing to do on the Korean peninsula. While the repercussions from a missile strike in Syria or the dropping of a giant bomb in Afghanistan can be contained, a preventative strike on North Korea could set off a chain reaction."

“I like Steve, but...”

"I feel very different from my peers, who think promiscuity is cool. My close friends don’t know that I haven’t had sex. If the subject comes up, I just avoid it."

In February the zoo achieved momentary fame after YouTube cut the live stream when what the zoo called “animal rights extremists” alleged a violation of the website’s “nudity and sexual content” policy.

Pitch perfect.

"In a study by the advocacy group GLAAD of American TV between 2016-2017, a record number of 278 LGBT characters were identified in TV shows. What was particularly poignant about the study was not just the swelling numbers, but the broadening range of characters on the LGBT sexuality/gender spectrum. TV’s rainbow diversity initiative appeared to be inching closer to its pot of gold."

"If ITV’s The Nightly Show, in which a series of well-known television hosts watch their careers go down the khazi over five days, proves anything, it’s that as surely as Americans will struggle to make a decent cup of tea, we will never master their late-night talkshow format."

"For all the expected cleverness and elegance of much of the writing in Pussy, future Jacobson readers and scholars may similarly wonder what he was thinking."

"What he does is wake them up, and tell them that in 45 minutes’ time they have to be at the front door having had their breakfast, and with their packed lunch in their bag. It never occurred to me that they could sort out their own food – I was doing it for them every day.”

"Never avoid someone who has been bereaved."

Can Europe's train system beat low cost airlines during the school holidays for value?