Chuck Yeager, the former US test pilot, war hero and first man to break the sound barrier, celebrated his 93rd birthday earlier this year.

But judging from his Twitter account, he has no intention of letting age mellow him.

General Yeager, lionised in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, has recently taken to social media like a (extraordinarily angry) duck to water.

Over the last few weeks, he has been responding to all manner of questions posed to him on Twitter – and giving some extremely forthright answers.