The Times’s report this week on the Thanksgiving Service for the life and work of Paul Scofield surprised me greatly with the inclusion among its list of attendees (sorry!) of someone called ‘Mr Antony Sher’. Don’t these Social Page wallahs realise he became Sir Antony Sher as long ago as 2000? Just because Paul Scofield famously declined a knighthood, this is no reason for The Thunderer to deprive other thesps of their due.

Meanwhile, over at The Spectator, an organ once well-known for the quality of its writing, the mightily bouffanted columnist Sarah Standing told us last week: “I am a woman that was born and bred in England.” That being the case (and ‘that’ being the error), you might have hoped she would write better English than she does.

She also told us: “I rather resent that I have been forced to take early retirement and have insidiously morphed into becoming an unrepresented minority.”

‘Resent that’? Really!