Ranked outside Fifa's top 100, Sammy McIlroy's men were hardly expected to win, but they were seeking something to lift morale for the 11 June European qualifier against Spain.

BBC: NI beaten by Italy

No 10 said David Cameron wanted changes to EU relations, adding it was "hardly news" the two men took a different approach to the future of Europe.

BBC: Nick Clegg: UK 'valuable' to US partly because of EU

And I hardly need to explain to the men and women of The Citadel how much our national security challenges have changed in the last generation.

CNN: Thompson's November 13, 2007, speech to The Citadel

And the girls, three of them university students, are so silly: dreaming non-stop of love and marriage, practising astrology, obsessed by the men they never, or hardly ever, are allowed to see but with whom they chirp like crickets throughout the night on their mobile phones.

ECONOMIST: Saudi fiction

When half the members of a teenage girls' online chatroom turned out to be middle-aged men, it was hardly a Tocquevillean moment.

ECONOMIST: Americans are joining clubs again

Since then, the two men (and their families) have hardly communicated with each other, according to several sources familiar with their affairs.

FORBES: Peru's Feuding Beauty Brothers Join Forbes' Billionaire Ranks

They said that colleges must spend equal sums on men's and women's sports, even though women athletes hardly knew what to do with all the money.

ECONOMIST: He believes in government, so why doesn��t America?

Mega-philanthropist and billionaire Ted Turner, who displayed such comfort with being on stage and with the subject that it was hardly necessary for him to sit up straight, over-shared that men are too testosterone-jacked to stay in any power positions at all.

FORBES: TEDWomen Day One Recap: Own Your Own Success, Says Sheryl Sandberg

It is hardly a revelation that literary young men of the Rupert Brooke era were often drawn more to each other than to women, and that this attraction had to be delicately negotiated in a wider world that did not always indulge it.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers