Spain vs Italy: who would win the wine Test?

In London, the weather is a gentle sashaying mockery. An Indian summer reminds us of the sullen apology of summer which we have just endured. Soon it will be winter, and ‘A cold coming we had of it’.

As always, poetry is a respite. My first resort is usually Yeats. In English, no one except Shakespeare is better at turning language into music. I have probably apologised before now in these columns for using those ravaging Yeatsian lines which have become a cliché because they are so true, so powerful, such an epitome of the post-1914 world and its agonies. ‘The best lack all conviction / The worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Has any historian ever rivalled that lapidary conclusive eloquence?

Such eloquence is too painful when public affairs are at a nadir. Yet there are other art forms, not all of which are in decline. In recent years, there have been attempts to denigrate proper cricket.