Society

The public mockery of Harry Maguire, the hapless Manchester United and England defender, has moved from being a bit of a joke to something a little more troubling, sinister even. The abuse, ridicule and attention he gets is way over the top, and increasingly resembles a publicly-sanctioned collective humiliation of one player. The unfortunate Maguire is seen as some kind of rubber doll, to be poked and harangued by one and all, rather than an ordinary human being with vulnerabilities. He is simply expected to suck up the abuse every time he steps on the field. What’s all this howling about? It isn’t just because he isn’t much good as

The unclued lights (six of two words and one of three words), one pair or individually, are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Ignore one apostrophe.         Across    1    Declare nothing will stop crime, causing disgust (8)    6    Attack, losing head in drinking bout (6) 11    Objects to intellects (5) 13    Young girl by supermarket, getting potato (7) 14    Humble faculty head embraces Doc (6) 16    Tail, small and trim (4) 17    Certainly not Greenland! (2-2,4) 21    African, say, on the wing, no good performing (3-5) 23    What about painting crosswise? (7) 25    Half a pound at Greek isle (3) 26    Sea loch oddly not in Seville

Beau Brummell, denouncing the fashion for a vegetable diet, was asked if he had never tried it himself: ‘Oh yes, I remember I once ate a pea.’ His remark sounded funnier then, because the normal way of talking about the little green spheres was as a collective, pease, as in pease pudding. Brummell was not the first to talk of one pea. Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, wrote in 1666 of a bud the size of a pea. Alternatively a single example was called a pease. I mention peas because their harvesting was done in the 18th century with two implements: a pix (shaped like a pickaxe, I suppose) to pull