Tony Blair’s continuing suzerainty of Downing Street fills decent people with a mixture of fear, disdain and an almost uncontrollable need to belly-laugh. Watching Blair drum out his hypo-crisies and half-truths, all his bogus compassion and credible pomposity, you wonder where he gets it all.

For more than 150 years, Americans have sent animals to war; legions of strong, furry brutes, bright-eyed, dumb and eternally loyal. But of course the Marines haven’t done <i>all</i> the fighting, and every so often it has been necessary to enlist the instincts and talents of beasts with sensitivities more refined than those of the human animal.

India has always had an embarrassment of riches for the traveller: marble Moghul tombs, grand palaces, palm-fringed beaches and Himalayan treks. Now the country has a new tourist attraction on offer: the village. To anyone who has spent time in India’s villages, paying to sun oneself while cattle loll and cowpats dry under the sky might seem a little far fetched.

It may be that the enduring memory about Solomon ”Stix” Morewa will be when, as the president of the South African Football Association (Safa), he was told to quit or be fired by the government-appointed Pickard commission into irregularities in the game. That would be, however, only one of the chapters in a biography of a man who did more good than harm.