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A spell has been cast. Three children – Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton – have magically gone from obscurity to global fame, after HBO announced that they will be playing Harry, Ron and Hermione in the new Harry Potter series. HBO released a photograph of the trio, kneeling in the grass looking earnest, expectant, enthusiastic – and very, very, young. My first thought? Good luck to them, they’re going to need it. The fact that HBO felt the need to immediately disable the comments underneath its Instagram post shows the scale of pre-emptive scrutiny the project is under. The series itself is a huge risk, and with many wondering how

As someone who flies a lot for work, many of my moments of high blood pressure or ‘Is this really what I want in life?’ introspection take place in airports or on aeroplanes. I cannot – to put it gently – relate to the moronic practitioners of the ‘airport theory’, which involves turning up deliberately late for flights to get an adrenaline rush, and/or to make a sorry living off social media views. No, I’m there in good time, so it shouldn’t be a particularly stressful experience. And yet I’ve come to rather despise flying. It wasn’t always this way. Admittedly my relationship with flying got off to a slightly

No man treads in the same river twice, wrote Heraclitus in the fifth century BC. No doubt that clever old bird was on to something, but nowadays it seems that we need to be careful about treading in rivers at all. It was reported last week that the River Loddon in Hampshire has been granted legal personhood by a local council, inspired by a document known as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers. The UDRR, created in 2017, was created by an organisation called the Earth Law Centre, and makes some pretty sweeping claims on behalf of our fluvial comrades, including the ‘right to flow’, the ‘right to

Our Serbian guide Zoran is a jovial fellow and as we rumble through the streets of Belgrade in our minibus he regales us with a joke about the difference between the various nationalities of the former Yugoslavia, all now with countries of their own. ‘We Serbs are rude,’ he says, ‘but the Croatians are self-centred, the Bosnians are thick, the Montenegrins are lazy and the Macedonians are just Serbs with a speech defect. As for the Slovenians, they are so polite they must be gay!’ Joking about each other is a definite improvement on fighting each other, as per so much of their history. The countries on my Balkan tour