Why give sportspeople a pass on the issues of the day?

Philip Roth passed away last week, but anyone who read last week’s column can breathe easy. I’m not going to try to write in his style the way I did with Tom Wolfe last Monday: the liver is safe in your fridge.

The tributes to Roth are still flowing in, though his approach to male-female relationships is one that’s bound to be reviewed intensively, if I can be as delicate as possible.

Like a lot of American writers he was interested in baseball and wrote a book about the sport - The Great American Novel, not one of his best. His view of the game informed his attitude to writing as well, given his famous aside about writing: “It’s just like baseball - you fail two-thirds of the time,” a line I like to trot out when I get the scorers wrong in a 3-19 to 2-25 hurling game.