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To play ‘cat and mouse’ with someone is to toy with them for a long time, as a cat would a mouse, with the aim of destroying them. This expression has the suffragettes (women fighting for the right to vote) in Britain at the start of the twentieth century to thank for its existence. When many of the suffragettes were arrested they would go on hunger strike – a tactic to be repeated throughout that century by other prisoners – to draw attention to their cause and embarrass the government. Various tactics were attempted by the government, including force-feeding, before it hit upon the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Health Act. Passed in 1913, this law allowed the prison authorities to detain a hunger-striking suffragette for so long that she became very weak and unable to actively protest. They would then release her, but she remained effectively on probation and could be arrested and forced to serve out the rest of the sentence, should she return to health and be caught breaking the law again. This law came to be known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, and so an evocative expression was born.