Just realised that I was wrong to claim that Dorneywood was intended as a country residence for the Foreign Secretary. It has in fact generally been regarded as a perk for either the Chancellor or the Home Secretary — as Simon Jenkins points out this morning. Chevening is the Foreign Secretary’s country residence.

Jenkins is also good on what motivated rich people to donate these grand houses to the government.

Dorneywood is one of a set of houses round London donated in the last century as a snare for naive Labour ministers. They were supposedly for the relaxation of those without “places” of their own. Both Chequers (1917) and Dorneywood (1942) were given during the tribulations of war and with socialism looming. Lord Stanhope gave the spectacular Chevening in 1967, obscurely for use by the Prince of Wales, the prime minister or another cabinet minister. Since 1980 this has tended to mean the foreign secretary.

The gifts had a mixed reception. Lord Haldane considered Chequers “a dangerous distraction” for those “unaccustomed to the charms of a country house”. Ministers would lose touch with government business and go native. Arthur Lee, Tory donor of Chequers, regarded this as precisely the point. A fine old house was architectural psychotherapy, to subvert whatever revolutionary instincts its occupant might harbour. The trust deed stated: “It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power will be drawn … To the revolutionary statesman, the antique and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history.” Maurice Hankey put it more succinctly: “Chequers should have a marvellous effect on these Labour people.”

TH Huxley described science as “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by ugly facts”. The same might be said of biography. It turns out that the famous Mrs Beeton (she of the eponymous cookbook) couldn’t cook and didn’t write it.

If Mrs Beeton had been alive today she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale, the Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday.

The image of the original domestic goddess and author of the definitive book on cookery and household management has been tainted. The real Mrs Beeton was in fact a strip of a girl who could not cook.

The historian Kathryn Hughes has written the definitive biography of a woman born in 1836 who became a template for hardworking housewives.

Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead.

How did she come to write the seminal book? “The answer is she copied everything,” Hughes said. It took Hughes five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.

But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. “Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.” Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for…

It takes the Grey Lady time to catch up, but she gets there eventually.

Soccer here is a three-ring circus, a zoo, a metaphor, a way of life. As a result, England’s indifferent record in the sport’s showcase event requires its supporters to perform an emotional high-wire act every four years, simultaneously holding two competing notions in their heads.

One: This will be the year their team finally realizes its massive potential and wins.

Two: Their team never wins. This year, England’s chronic angst is compounded by two facts. The first is that the tournament is being played in Germany, home of its bitterest rival and agent of some of its biggest defeats. In 1990, England lost a heartbreaking match to Germany in a penalty-kick shootout in the World Cup semifinals. In fact, after England’s greatest victory over Germany — its 4-2 extra-time victory in the 1966 final — 24 years passed before the English beat the Germans again in a major competition. The second problem is Rooney’s foot. Rooney, a prodigy who rose from the rough streets of Liverpool to become a star at Manchester United, is England’s most talented scorer and its greatest hope. But last month he broke a metatarsal bone in his right foot, and on Friday he was ruled out for the first round of matches. Every day there have been conflicting reports, anguished speculation, hope on the heels of despair…

… survive, as Bill Gates knows. This week’s Economist reports that:

On May 18th America’s State Department said it would not use 16,000 computers it recently bought from Lenovo, a Chinese firm, for sensitive “classified” work. Instead the PCs will be used for more prosaic matters… Moreover, the department said it was “initiating changes in its procurement processes in light of the changing ownership of IT equipment providers”.

Interesting. Lenovo, you will remember, is the firm to which IBM sold its comjputer manufacturing business. So when you buy an IBM Thinkpad today, you’re really buying a Lenovo machine.

Why the State Department’s paranoia? Well, as the Economist tactlessly points out, the US has long experience of convert surveillance. For example, in 2001 there was a minor diplomatic scuffle when the Chinese discovered that a Boeing plane built for the then Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, was stuffed with bugging devices.