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Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood’s young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the over-privileged, over-grown, over-thinking spoilt brat of a hero – especially when he becomes the ‘prey’ of the much older Mrs Robinson – but that the toy boy is played by the 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman and the cougar by the 35-year-old (and far more attractive) Anne Bancroft merely highlights the misogyny of the enterprise. I used

Ian Chappell, the flinty Australian captain, has said that after giving cricket to the world the English did nothing further to develop the game. That original gift, it might be argued, was a fairly significant bequest, but Chappell could point to postwar history. In his lifetime, cricket has been shaped by Australians, West Indians, and Indians. Oh, the ghastliness of English football! The dim players, detached from the world in their grim mansions It is harder to challenge the view that the English, who codified the laws of Association Football in 1863, have spent the last century resting on their oars. The national team has won the World Cup once,

We are having a glorious July where I live in Poland. There have been pleasantly warm days. The birds are singing. The beer is cool. So, why does a sense of melancholy keep snaking around my consciousness? Well, for various reasons. I can’t claim to be the world’s most cheerful man. But one reason is that we have passed the summer solstice – the longest day of the year. I find myself wondering how on Earth it is July when March feels so recent However warm and bright it is, the days will soon grow colder and darker. The best is behind us. The worst lies ahead. Today we are