South Africa’s last white leader appears to defend policy of segregating racial groups

Roy Hodgson has always been a good and dignified football man and if any reassurance was required it came plentifully enough at his unveiling as the England manager yesterday.

We are told that big girls don't cry, but we know that master golfers do. Bubba Watson's uncontrollable sobbing when he holed the putt that won him the US Masters was quite something. First his caddy, and then his mother, offered a strong shoulder for Bubba to blub on, the emotional release of victory after four days of toiling proving too much for him.

'The first time we worked together it got so heated he threw a plate and a glass at me'

As a new season starts, Worcester await the third generation of a very famous name

Patrick Flanery's debut novel constructs a mosaic of contemporary South Africa: a country where ugly human crime, past and present, jars against natural beauty, and as powerfully depicted here as in any book by J M Coetzee or Damon Galgut.

So there I was, in our Shia mosque on Friday 10 days back, when a worshipper, a man, bounded up full of smiles. We had met briefly once before. As I was rushing to the prayer hall he made me promise I would talk to him afterwards. And so I did. And wish I hadn't. Instead of feeling spiritually renewed I experienced ungodly fury and left the beautiful space filled with despondency. We had an argument about Syria and my vocal opposition to Assad's regime. I didn't understand anything, said he, and was being deceived by the lying Western media. He was a businessman in Syria with factories employing many people, Shias in particular, he stressed, as if that would sway me. The rebellion, he claimed, was a plot by outsiders and backed by Sunnis because they want to crush minority Muslim sects, including the Allawi-Assad family.

So the sporting protest is alive and well – though cuffing yourself to the goalpost because Ryanair won't give your daughter a job is not quite the same as the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. What next? A mass demonstration against EasyJet's excess baggage policy?

Christmas books of the year

The all-rounder's form in 1968 made it hard to exclude him from the South Africa tour that never was, writes Stephen Brenkley

The South African government has conceded that 30 per cent of land it has bought since the end of apartheid for redistribution to black farmers has been resold by the beneficiaries, often to the original owners.

Ink artist Clifford Charles is to have his latest collection exhibited at Pallant House Gallery next week.

The death of Magnus Malan marks the passing of one of the most powerful and notorious leaders of the apartheid era. To his enemies, he was a figure of fear and hatred – one of the monsters of an evil system; to his colleagues and subordinates he was a figure of awe – the general who reorganised the military and then reorganised the country along military lines.