Grass Valley is a small town in the California Sierra Nevadas, and every year the Grass Valley Charter School Foundation holds a fundraising fair, the Blue Marble Jubilee, that celebrates planet Earth with folk music and activities for children, such as making paper butterflies and egg carton caterpillars. This year’s Jubilee was scheduled for 11 May.

James Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, has been trimmed of any back story that doesn’t prepare us, in one way or another, for his account of the events before, during and after the election of Donald Trump. It opens in the early 1990s, with the interrogation of Salvatore ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano, ‘the highest ranking American mobster ever to become a federal witness’, who explains ‘the rules of Mafia life’. Comey is later reminded of this episode during his first meeting with Trump’s team: ‘I sat there thinking, holy crap, they are trying to make each of us an “amica nostra”.’