Dirty Diary

A truth less universally acknowledged – mainly because it's barely believable – is that 200 years after her death, Austen has now become a sort of literary poster girl for America's alt-right, that collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and White House strategists who believe in things which aren't real, even though they'd like them to be so they can say: "I told you so!" Such as: Muslims are bad, Jews are bad, political correctness is bad, feminists are bad, Mexico is bad, not being allowed to take your gun to school is bad.

How did the Jane Austen thing happen? According to English Literature professor Nicole Wright, writing in the Washington DC-based Chronicle Of Higher Education, there are three reasons. First, Austen is seen as being a “symbol of sexual purity”. Second, she's viewed as a “standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture”. Third, she's the “exception that proves the rule of female inferiority”.

Wright has trawled some of the scarier bits of the internet and found plentiful mentions of Austen on alt-right websites and blogs to support her findings. But even at the University of Colorado, where she teaches, this alt-right Austen has been invoked – by none other than disgraced former Breitbart News writer Milo Yiannopoulos, when his Dangerous Faggot Tour stopped there recently. “As a Victorian novelist might have put it,” he said in his opening words, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one. That is true and all the studies bear me out.”

Hard to know where to begin with that one, though Wright starts with the obvious bit – Austen wasn't actually a Victorian novelist, you numbskull – and works onwards from there.

La, tea, dotty

THE charge sheet against David Tennant is long and ruinous to a good night's sleep, and runs from infiltrating Hogwarts using Polyjuice Potion as Death-Eater Barty Crouch Jr to wearing baseball boots as the 10th (and scruffiest) Dr Who to only coming 16th in the 2008 Sexiest Man In The World poll. But one thing he does have going for him is that as detective Alec Hardy in Broadchurch he knows how to make tea – in a microwave.

Now some viewers – as well as Hardy's on-screen partner Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) – were outraged last week when he popped a cold cuppa into one of these infernal machines to warm it up. But it turns out this is a perfectly acceptable method of doing it, according to tea expert William Gorman, chairman of the Tea And Infusions Association.

“Usually when people's tea goes cold they reboil the kettle and make another cup,” says the UK's Mr Brew. “But doing this you are guaranteed to give yourself a dull cup of tea. You need freshly drawn water for a good cup because reboiling it takes out all the oxygen and nitrogen out of it.

“A better solution is to put it in the microwave for 15 to 20 seconds. When you microwave tea, all you're doing from a scientific point of view is just moving the molecules around and getting it back up to a decent temperature. It is not impacting the flavour at all.”

Alco-chocs

HOW would you explain Buckfast to someone who knows zilch about Scotland, like a Martian or a Tory Prime Minister?

Well you'd start with the easy bit – it's an alcoholic drink made to an old French recipe – and work up to the, er, harder stuff. Like: it's traditionally produced by Benedictine monks at the Devon abbey whose name it bears. Like: it tastes of cough medicine mixed with Ribena. Like: it's consumed in vast quantities by young Scots living in the so-called Buckie Triangle, an area covering part of the central belt. Like: it crops up in a staggering number of crime reports. Like: it's now available in Easter egg form.

Woah, hang on. If our putative Martian or Tory PM hasn't already legged it in the face of that blizzard of baffling information, things just took a turn for the truly unbelievable, didn't they?

Afraid not. An enterprising off-licence in Northern Ireland, D-Bees, is selling a 140g Buckfast chocolate egg in a package which also includes a miniature (ie breakfast-sized) Buckfast bottle, a Buckfast-branded pen, a cigarette lighter and a magnet. The brains behind this bold move into what you might call “statement confectionary” – or even “police statement confectionary” – is Mr D-Bee himself, Derek Brennan. He has 20,000 eggs to sell at £9.99 a pop and yes, he will ship to Scotland. As of the middle of last week, he'd already had orders for 2000.

Throne the crows

IF you have a spare 20 minutes, know the Dothraki for "two bottles of Buckie and an easter egg" and think a Keep Calm And Stick Them With The Pointy End T-shirt would be a useful wardrobe addition, then the Games Of Thrones Research Project (GOTRP) has need of you.

The GOTRP is a team of academics led by Professor Clarissa Smith, associate director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. And it has been set up to figure out why George RR Martin's fantasy novel series and the TV show based on them have proved such a smash hit.

“We’ve sensed that Game of Thrones is significant, and important, a 'game-changer’,” explains Professor Smith. “But we’re not yet sure how.”

And so fans can help them by taking a 24-question survey. They'll be asked to rate their political views; say who their favourite character is; whether they indulge in “cosplay”; what sort of person they'd be if they were in it themselves; and what kind of series they see Game Of Thrones as (dark soap opera, epic saga, moral fable or excuse for gratuitous nudity?). And, finally, what they understand by the show's most famous catchline: "Winter is coming."

Professor Smith, by the way, is also editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed academic journal Porn Studies. But don't let that put you off.