War is futile, with no winners, only losers. No war ever solved a problem that could not have been better solved by other means, and no war ever solved a problem without creating another one.

On the one hand, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of Egypt’s ability to deliver large-scale infrastructure projects that the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza, which should have been completed in 2012, has finally opened its majestic doors, and only partially.

It is an axiom in negotiations that those who are especially good at the job have an ability to place themselves in the shoes of the people with whom they are negotiating: to understand why they think as they think, do what they do, say what they say.

Hezbollah has spent most of the past year lobbing rudimentary and largely ineffectual rockets in the general direction of northern Israel, whence most of the civilian population has in any case already long departed.

I am not in the business of offering advice to Benjamin Netanyahu on how to prolong what some might consider to be an already excessively elongated political career. Far from it. But if I were, I would urge the Israeli prime minister to watch “The Godfather.”

For defenders of the right to free speech — and anyone who read these pages last week will know that I am one — the encrypted messaging app Telegram presents something of a conundrum.

So you pop into your local coffee shop, you order your usual caramel oat milk latte, you meet a friend and you chat, and you pass on a piece of scurrilous gossip about a mutual acquaintance that, while entertaining, is entirely devoid of any basis in fact.