At 38, Jimmy Anderson, Test cricket’s most successful fast bowler, is running farther than ever. This year, he picked up his 600th wicket in a strange, locked-down summer of cricket, in which he practised into a golf net, kept his spit off the ball, and tried not to hug his teammates.

When the National Army Museum in London reopens this spring, its exhibits will include the skeleton of Marengo, Napoleon’s white charger. This was, reportedly, the horse that won its name after bearing Napoleon to victory in northern Italy, then carried him through Austerlitz and Jena, back in slumped defeat from Russia, and finally at Waterloo.

The concept of white-collar boxing – of a stressful, competitive hobby for people who already had stressful, competitive jobs – didn’t surprise Peel. He understood why bankers did it. All the pressures of the career – acute though they were – acquired a varnish of sameness, just as the moneyed, expat lifestyle followed a uniform […]