Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months?

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

Sleepy drivers who don’t want to stop their journey have two choices: pull over and take a short nap or load up with caffeine to stay awake.

So what’s the better option? French researchers decided to find out, testing the driving performance of two dozen sleep-deprived motorists.

When I came across the story of Laurent Vernet, a renowned eater of cows, who can tell the sex, age and breed of the beast from a single bite of steak, I thought "Ohh that's interesting - what a palate". But somewhere in the recesses of my mind Coleridge's famous lines on Wordsworth's Prelude also crept in: "... Had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out 'Wordsworth'". Great literature, like great beef, has its own unique taste and texture - we know it when we read it. The article resounded all the more when I read that "eyeing up an off-puttingly large pile of raw meat" Vernet declared, "Most people never have more than one steak on their plate so they never realise how different they are."

This struck a deep chord with me - not because I was salivating over a salver of steaks but because I was engaged in, and only half way through, my own literary chomp-a-thon: a back-to-back reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.