The best caught on camera might come courtesy of Michelle Obama, who, after words with Republican speaker John Boehner at an Inauguration Day luncheon in 2013, flashed a devastating roll of the pupils just outside his field of vision.

Not so for Julie Bishop, whose celebrated eye-roll at Joe Hockey last week seemed almost comically exaggerated, as if she were playing it up for the parliamentary cameras. At least, that was Malcolm Turnbull's theory - the Communications Minister argued there had never been an optical movement "more sensationalised". Bishop's own "death stare" might care to disagree.

The context of the Foreign Minister's contempt was clear. The Treasurer was lauding the late Malcolm Fraser for his establishment of the notorious Expenditure Review Committee, the very name of which cuts through the air like the Razor Gang itself slashes departmental budgets.

"That committee has endured, much to the chagrin of my colleagues," Hockey goaded. "It is one of his [Fraser's] lasting legacies."

There were sighs and howls from all over the Coalition benches but it was Bishop's - complete with a shaking of the head and Miranda Priestly-esque pursing of the lips - that captured public attention. Bishop had only that morning heard (courtesy of a newspaper report) that her foreign aid budget might be in line for another slicing at the hands of the ERC. She had reason to be contemptuous.

But eye-rolling has not always expressed ridicule or disbelief. Throughout centuries of literature it has been a signal of seduction or the trademark of a temptress, Slate's Forrest Wickman discovered. He draws our attention to John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which tempting women were bred "to sing, to dance, to dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye". It was to this display that the "sober race of men ... shall yield up all their virtue". Wickman points also to the English hymn writer Isaac Watts, who told of "virgins, who roll your artful eyes and shoot delicious danger thence", and to other references in Shakespeare, the Oxford English Dictionary and American country music.

This little slice of history comes as little surprise to body language expert David Alssema, because "the eyes are a big pathway into seduction". While he says there's a world of difference between a sexy stare and a contemptuous roll of the eyes, there are similarities with the Princess Diana-style head-down, eyes-up glance that can be "quite seductive".

It was not until the 1980s that eye-rolling began en masse as a symbol of annoyance and doubt, Wickman writes. According to a linguistic investigation by William Safire in The New York Times, the noun "eye-roller" was derived from a Washington Post account of a 1987 speech by Caspar Weinberger. The former Defense Secretary was "cheerfully rattling on", reported Edwin M. Yoder, with some listeners "rolling their eyes upward in an unmistakable 'oh, brother' expression". Weinberger's claim that blowouts in his portfolio had nothing to do with the Reagan Administration's budget deficits was, in Yoder's words, "the big eye-roller".

We can't be too surprised that matters of state finance have so often sent pupils northward. More intriguing perhaps is the University of Washington study that found eye-rolling was a strong predictor of divorce. It was one of several facial expressions and body movements that were prevalent in troublesome relationships, psychology professor John Gottman found.

Perhaps that's because - at least in some of the more well-known examples - eye-rolling seems to be the proclivity of strong, assertive women no longer inclined to accept balderdash from the men around them. Would Julie Bishop agree?