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My suggested ante-post bets for tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.) have featured prominently in this column for several weeks now. The good news is that these wagers are looking promising. My three long-term tips for the big Aintree spectacle were all put up at juicy prices that are long gone. My fourth Grand National bet, Desertmore House has – as I feared – narrowly failed to make the cut but that was NRNB (Non Runner No Bet), so there is no harm to anyone’s bank balance. So what of the chances of my three selections tomorrow now that the ground is likely to ride very soft? Mahler Mission, put

What do we talk about when we talk about Marilyn Monroe? Sex, death and everything in between. Unlike other legendary film stars from Garbo to Bardot, Monroe has become (to use that awful and over-popular word) ‘iconic’ – which is ‘problematic’ in itself. Being recognisable as a hank of blonde hair and a white dress failing to preserve her dignity dehumanises Marilyn – and we know that being treated as a ‘thing’ contributed towards her terminal sorrow. We want to have our cheesecake and eat it, without adding the heavy weight of posthumous complicity in the death of this likeable young woman – which is what Monroe was, beneath all the

When you’re playing a word game, don’t you sometimes feel how horribly unfair it is that players who know more words prosper? Wouldn’t it be better to have word games that didn’t rely so heavily on knowledge of the dictionary, that weren’t so, y’know, wordy? And, come to that, wouldn’t a kindler, gentler sort of word game be, like, collaborative – so that players helped each-other to celebrate their diversity rather than competing to, ugh, ‘win’?  This upside-down is a game which will bear the same relationship to Scrabble that tennis does to Junior Bake-Off Mattel has you covered. The company has announced that Scrabble sets will now have double-sided

Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast, is the world’s most successful YouTuber. More than 250 million people follow his channel. His videos are mostly absurd challenges involving obscene amounts of cash generated from his YouTube advertising revenue. In one video, he eats $100,000 worth of gold leaf ice cream; in another, he pays a participant $10,000 a day to see how long they’re willing to live in a supermarket. His most popular video, a remake of the Korean survival horror TV show Squid Game, has over half a billion views.  There seems almost nothing negative that can be said about Donaldson – well, almost nothing Donaldson and his team of friends

April is nesting season and with it comes egg collectors, an illegal band of very specialised and, in some ways, very British of criminals. Many would consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. Most see their crime as a hobby, ignoring the effects of stealing a clutch of eggs and thus accelerating the species decline in a particular location. The thieves are certainly expert birders; they are able to recognise the nests of particular birds and know when to attempt their raids and where best to launch their raids. Older egg snatchers know not to exhibit their collections But though knowledgeable, they are despised across the birding community. The thieves themselves are not