Playbooks are proliferating like cookbooks. In the past fortnight or so I’ve come across: the counter-hybrid playbook, the wartime playbook, the Coldplay playbook, the preppy-meets-sporty playbook, Hitler’s playbook, the Ben Stokes playbook and the nepo-baby playbook.

I used to think that the rather thumbed metaphor of playbook referred to a book of words containing the script or libretto. After all, book of words or book of the words has often been used figuratively to mean ‘the rules’. In Money in the Bank (1942), P.G. Wodehouse has Dolly Molloy exclaim: ‘There’s nothing in the book of the words to prevent Mrs Cork having the bozo pinched and stowed away in the cooler.’

In the medieval theatre the literal playbook was looked after by the garnement man, the props man. With the coming of printing, plays were read like novels as well as watched. Polly Peachum’s mother in The Beggar’s Opera (1728) blames them for her falling in love: ‘Those cursed Play-books she reads have been her Ruin.’

But play had long denoted the conduct of a game as well as a drama. In 1476, the second book Caxton printed was The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Purchasers might have been disappointed to discover that it was not a How To book, but an allegory of social roles. Caxton calls the bishops alphyns, a word derived from Persian for ‘elephant’, but pictures them as judges in chairs.

By the 20th century Americans were using play to mean ‘a group of actions in a game regarded as a single coherent act’. The Omega Point of play emerged in the years 1932-40 under Paul Brown as chief coach of Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio. The supposed playbook of world leaders seldom follows any such rigid pattern. Perhaps Vladimir Putin’s imperial vision of Russia resembles a playbook. But when Ursula von der Leyen says, ‘Europe needs its own counter-hybrid playbook,’ she really means: ‘Has anyone got a good idea for responding to Russian sabotage?’