“The 19th-century fetishism of facts was justified by a fetishism of documents,” EH Carr wrote in his 1961 book What is History? “But no document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought – what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought … The facts, whether found in documents or not, have still to be processed by the historian before he can make any use of them.”

There is a moment in the movie Primary Colors when presidential candidate Jack Stanton (played by John Travolta) demands that someone call his campaign manager, only to be reminded that he just threw his phone out of the car window in a tantrum. They circle back to look for the phone, which his wife, Susan (played by Emma Thompson), finds in some bushes. “Well, shit,” says Jack, “you wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t thrown it out of the car.”

There is a moment in the movie Primary Colors when presidential candidate Jack Stanton (played by John Travolta) demands that someone call his campaign manager, only to be reminded that he just threw his phone out of the car window in a tantrum. They circle back to look for the phone, which his wife, Susan (played by Emma Thompson), finds in some bushes. “Well, shit,” says Jack, “you wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t thrown it out of the car.”

While writing a New Yorker profile on Donald Trump in the late 1990s, Mark Singer attempted to discover something about the businessman’s private thoughts, as opposed to his outsized, public persona. When Singer asked him what he thought about when shaving in front of the mirror, Trump did not really understand the question.

As Oswald Dixon was laid to rest in Salford on Wednesday the heavens wept. One hundred years old and with no traceable family, when he died on 25 September the staff at his care home feared no one would come to his funeral. They put out an appeal for mourners. And on a rainswept midweek afternoon about 300 showed up.

Departing Tory leaders have developed an odd and presumptuous habit of demanding that the leader of the opposition resign too. “As a party leader who has accepted when her time was up,” Theresa May told Jeremy Corbyn in her final prime minister’s questions, preparing to leave her party to Boris Johnson and the country without a prayer, “perhaps the time has come for him to do the same.”