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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

There's only one question that's really troubling Paper Monitor today. It's not one of those petty niggling queries that the Independent is wont to come up with once in a while, such as "Is global warming being further stoked by civil liberty infringements?" Neither is it one of the posers known to emanate from the Sun's Dear Deirdre column, a la "My girlfriend has suggested a threesome with the bored housewife next door… should I agree?"

Nope, this is an enquiry of far greater import; a question that no doubt would have furrowed the brows of philosophers from Plato to Derrida had they been readers of the Daily Mail… "Why ARE intelligent women such fools in love?"

Who can say? Well, Anna Pasternak for one, but Paper Monitor has no time to get involved in the small print. Especially not when there is an even more challenging question: hands up who can remember the Daily Mail ever being self-effacing?

There's a first for everything, though. Today's Mail picks up on a story from yesterday's paper, of a decoded 17th Century diary, and uses it as a springboard to ask what if the Mail had been around in the 1600s, how would it have reported the big stories of the day.

The Sun, for one, jumped on this bandwagon a few months ago in the shape of a whole book that dared to imagine how history's great scientific discoveries would have been reported by the red top.

So how would "Ye Olde Daily Mail" have headlined the story of the Gunpowder Plot? "Ye 5/11 plot foiled"; the fate of Guy Fawkes? "FREE tickets for ye bigge execution"; the sailing of the Mayflower? "Asylum crisis deepens as pilgrims sail".

And here's a line, from the introduction to the whole piece, that's worth squirrelling away for when the Mail next tells you the world ain't as good as it used to be. "[I]t only goes to prove things haven't changed that much."

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