Sport

As you know, only seven batsmen have scored more than 50,000 first-class runs. Hobbs, Woolley, Hendren, Mead, Grace, Sutcliffe and Hammond are untouchable. We shall not see their like again. The game changes and old records written on parchment are left unmolested, gathering dust. Comparisons between the great players of a single era are troublesome enough; fashioning them between the cricketers of the prelapsarian past and those of today is an exercise easily considered futile. And yet the hunger to do so is a craving that can never be wholly pacified. The 50,000 run mark is an arbitrary figure, for sure, but if you add-up all the runs scored in

On waking up (at noon) on Thursday morning, I found I had a text from one of my fellow History freshers. Sent at 6am and accompanied by a screenshot of a half-finished essay: ‘WHY am I still up?!’ The all-nighter is a notorious Oxford experience, and not one I thought I would ever have to sample. ‘I’ll be fine getting the work done at university,’ I blithely assured those warning me of how unstructured a History student’s life is, ‘I like to keep busy.’ What I failed to appreciate is that it’s impossible not to be busy at university. School without lessons was dire — by Tuesday afternoon of the

Andy Murray may have crashed out of the US Open; but last time I checked he was still a hero in this land after 12 months of triumph. All of which makes the recent travails of Conservative MP David Amess rather odd. A complaint to the PPC shows that his local paper, The Southend Echo, made an erroneous claim about him wanting Murray to be knighted, after he was subjected to public abuse. The paper has since grovelled and apologised; but at least it exposed its patch as being the most anti-Murray part of the country.

An Aussie rules footballer was apparently in trouble for having set fire to a dwarf who had been booked to entertain the team at an end of season party. Clinton Jones saw the diminutive Blake Johnston capering around and, being a half-wit, couldn’t resist applying a gas lighter to his backside. Whooooof, went the dwarf. Quite rightly Jones has been carpeted by bosses and forced to pay compensation. Too few people understand that dwarves are highly flammable – and some will actually explode if exposed to a naked flame. If you are being entertained by a dwarf it is a good idea to spray them with a fine mist of

It was pretty dark. Darker, in fact, than it had been when the players were hauled off for bad light earlier in the test. Darker, too, than it had been in Manchester when Michael Clarke objected to the umpire’s decision to halt play on account of the light. But so what? Was there any evidence that continuing to play would constitute an “obvious and foreseeable risk to the safety of any player or umpire, so that it would be unreasonable or dangerous for play to take place”? That is what the laws demand; it remains a mystery why this is not the standard umpires actually use. The England batsmen did not think conditions

Thumping Australia is grand; thumping Australia without playing well almost feels like cheating. But in a good way. This is where England find themselves today. The Ashes are safe for another few months and England have not had to be very good to keep them. Which is just as well, frankly, since even though they are unbeaten in 12 tests England are not quite as good a side as they like to think they are. They are good enough to defeat these hapless Australians, however. The Australians are basically New Zealand in disguise. Like New Zealand they are a side good enough to get themselves into good positions but not

Within waving distance of blessed solid ground, Susan Taylor lost her bid to swim the Channel — and, with it, her life. She was 34 years old, brainy and beautiful, gifted and giving; it is, indeed, a peculiarly bitter irony that it was the giving that killed her. For years she had been an avid fundraiser, facing all manner of challenges in charitable effort, and for this, her final swim, she even gave up her job as an accountant to train: admirable in intent, courageous in execution. What I find less admirable, however, is the general acceptance that this kind of stunt is a reasonable and even a desirable way

What a glorious sporting summer it has been so far. For some the highlight will have been Andy Murray at Wimbledon, for others that nailbiting first Test against the Aussies. But for me, none of this comes even close to matching the joy, the exultation, the triumph of the moment on an Atlantic beach a few days ago when our hot young female Portuguese surf instructor took Girl and me aside to comment on our morning’s performance. ‘You, Poppy, and you, James, are both good,’ she said. That’s ‘good’ as in the exact opposite of ‘bad’. Indeed that’s good, quite possibly, as in — though she didn’t actually express this

Dunblane yesterday evening and, an hour after Andy Murray has won the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, the streets are still thronged with cheerful revellers. Smiles and saltires abound. Locals and visitors cluster for photographs around the golden letterbox commemorating Murray’s Olympic triumph last year. Journalists have been despatched to pen colour pieces from Murray’s home town. On the Stirling road two young girls, one sporting a saltire as a kind of sari, hold up a poster of the local hero; every passing car honks its horn in celebratory salutation. The boy has done it. Not bad, not bad at all. This morning, acres of newsprint are devoted to Murray’s