To lose two looks like carelessness and deserves all the opprobrium we can muster.Yet Best, in the grip of an addiction arguably more terrible than a cheeseburger habit, has never tried to blame anyone but himself. Drunk or sober, Best can teach us a thing or two about dignity I hope he beats his [...]

His apartment was stuffed from floor to ceiling with books for which there was no more shelf-room and paintings he had not yet found time or space to hang. He was an inveterate traveller, always the first to fly to a new museum or a recently opened ski-slope. He was an entertaining host, an [...]

It was originally a 17th-century agricultural building, then in the 1820s it was turned into a school. When we saw it, it had 16 outside loos, a massive oil tank and lots of tarmac. It had been for sale for some time, and I think no-one had liked the scale of what had to [...]

Barring accidents, the question is not who but when.The answer should be: not yet Hussain will return next week refreshed. This is an increasingly rare state for a leading cricketer to find himself in, and a vital one for Nasser, whose intensity tends to leave him exhausted by the end of a series. After [...]

“If you’ve got £100,000 you will get a luxury house of at least 300m2. You also get four bedrooms, a double garage, swimming pool plus a lot of house.” Campbell has found that the country’s relatively low cost of living is an attraction for people retiring permanently to South Africa.She explains: “They can sell [...]

Meanwhile, the newly created Iraqi Governing Council is formally asking the UN for a multinational force to supplement the US and British troops. That could solve the mandate problem, but the UN will have to consider the credibility of that council before it responds.. Since the run-up to the war in Iraq, when Charles [...]

When the bales were seven layers high, the wall plate – a timber structure that incorporated the floor joists – was pegged down onto them with more hazel rods. Five more layers of bales were stacked up and pegged down and another wall plate, on which the roof was to sit, was then added.The [...]

No matter who you are, payback always seems to be around the next dogleg. But transport yourself forward two days and there was the world No 2 handing over the money in a “friendly” four-ball to Vijay Singh and Charles Howell III. Why, it could be enough to ruin a man.But maybe not Els, [...]

OK, maybe we should try to shorten our commutes but in practice it is hard to do so, particularly for dual-income families with jobs in different places.But if good decisions about infrastructure greatly benefit a society, bad ones impose a huge burden Often we don’t see that burden. The cost of Britain’s nuclear power [...]

Nasa stood accused of complacency and suffering from safety “blind spots” yesterday in a damning final report into the Columbia shuttle disaster seven months ago. Without reform, “the scene is set for another accident”, the report warned.They highlighted Nasa’s failure to heed warnings that insulation foam had broken away, damaging one of the shuttle’s [...]