There is great anger, Donald Trump said early in his campaign for the Republican nomination. “Believe me, there is great anger.” And it is that anger that Mr Trump went on to surf into the White House. Anger played a large part in the other great political shake-up of the year, the EU referendum in the UK. When it comes to rhetoric, 2016 has been a year in which the wind changed: away from optimism and towards aggression; away from argument and towards assertion.

What we have seen is a change not just in politics — away from an essentially technocratic and centrist establishment — but in the language of politics. Mark Thompson, the former BBC director-general and now chief executive of the New York Times, quoted Mr Trump’s line on anger in Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong With The Language of Politics?, which was published in the summer. He argues that the prevailing currents of the day — fuelled and amplified by social media — are towards emotive, maximalist language, preaching to the converted, and the production of heat rather than light.

He was right. Both Clinton partisans and UK Remainers struggled to find a slogan as emotive or as forceful as “Take Back Control” or “Make America Great Again”. Compare the flaccid, verbless “Better Together” and “Stronger In”. Both winning slogans were imperative in mood: a call to action rather than floating expressions of a vague status quo.