Sport
Left without pleasures
No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn
Barometer
Matters of life and death Lord Lucan is now officially presumed dead. How do you have someone declared dead? In…
Six Nations rugby
Back in 1882, exactly 100 years before I was born, the Four Nations rugby competition was formed. It was originally…
Game over
If sport loses the public’s faith – and it’s starting to – then all its power and glory will fade
From the dismal to the delightful: the year in sport
So long, then, to another thrilling year of sport in which the full range of human possibility — from the…
High life
Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until…
Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport
Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had…
Barometer
A marathon of cheats Russian athletes may be stripped of the medals they won at the 2012 Olympics, but what…
Barometer
Available for parties Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said that leaving his party to join the Liberal Democrats would be…
The right track
Sebastian Coe’s new job as head of world athletics will be a heck of a lot easier thanks to the…
Best of enemies
Why nothing in sport beats thrashing the Aussies at cricket
The ugly game
I’ve spent years defending football from middle-class disdain. But I can’t do it any more
Champions of absurdity
Jumping the shark isn’t yet an Olympic sport, but if it were the International Olympic Committee would be a shoo-in…
Big ask
‘That’s unnecessarily crude,’ said my husband, turning momentarily from the television and improving the shining minute by setting the whisky…
Barometer
Safe house Lord Sewel is unique in leaving the House of Lords in disgrace. Until the House of Lords Reform…
Australia’s comeback kids
I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give…
Long life
I have always been what I suppose one could call a weed, and a cowardly one at that. I never…
Fun runs
At long last, the England cricket team have rediscovered their love of the game
Diary
My husband says I only write books in order to have a launch party. Not so. I also write books…
Champions of hypocrisy
Why sport and sham morality go so well together
Your problems solved
Q. I was at the theatre recently and bumped into a well-known Liverpudlian crooner coming out of the disabled lavatory.…
Confessions of a Fedhead
Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous…
Pliny the Younger on Fifa
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…
A few tips for Straussie
If you watched England’s three-day Test defeat by the West Indies in Barbados the other day to the bitter end…
Sir Ian Botham is a hero – and a fool
Mark Mason 28 November 2015 9:00 am
In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after…