Society

Long before the official numbers began to rise, back in 2014, it was clear that knife crime was on the up. You could tell by the way small boys chased each other through the park with machetes, and by the zombie blades left in flower beds. Now, seven years later, I feel the same way about what goes by the cosy-sounding name of ‘neighbourhood crime’. There’s the fashion for car theft (as poor Sam Leith found out), and the constant predatory circling of iPhone thieves on e-scooters. But worse than that, I think burglary is back, and I think it’s thanks to crack. We know drug use is creeping up:

Avery Brundage was known to his enemies as Avery Ice Age — and to quite a few of his friends too, I would imagine. He was a man of ‘dictatorial temperament’, according to one of his critics. A wealthy American, Brundage brought his ultra-conservative outlook to bear on the Olympics, which he bossed from 1952-72. He was, another critic said, bent on ‘insulating the Games from the meddlesome tentacles of the real world’. He was particularly keen on the idea of amateurism, regardless (or maybe because) of the fact that the amateur ideal was the brainchild of the English aristocracy that ensured they didn’t have to compete against the lower

Happy valet Police Scotland dropped what they said was a randomly generated codeword — ‘Bunter’ — for the security operation when Boris Johnson visited Scotland. While the name invited comparisons between the PM and Billy Bunter, the overweight public schoolboy in the Greyfriars stories, there is another Bunter in fiction. Mervyn Bunter was the immaculate and well-organised manservant to private detective Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers’ crime stories. This Bunter’s defining characteristics were knowledge, accuracy and loyalty — and he was always on hand to correct Wimsey before he committed any social faux pas. Making a run for it Belarussian athlete Krystina Timanovskaya was offered asylum by Poland