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Two hours later, his manager told reporters: “He’s still crying. We’re making him drink water because he’s becoming dehydrated.”

During a chess match between Spassky and Fischer in 1971, Bobby Fischer refused to allow any of the spectators to eat fruit yoghurt in the auditorium because he suspected secret messages were being transmitted to Boris through which flavours they were eating.

The worst losers in sport

Last year, a German team revealed that magpies, marked with a coloured sticker under their beaks, tried to remove it when presented with a mirror.

Rebecca Morelle

First he won his wife, Joanna, by a coup de main; he fell in love with her when she was a girl, in Rome; then, she was going to be sent into Scotland to be married; but she had to go through Verona, to the Adige gate. So Can Grande pounced upon her; declared she was much too precious a gempreziosa gemma to be sent to Scotland, and she went no farther.

John Ruskin

There’s a bench quite far down in front of the London bridge. If you sit there and look straight at the bridge at sunset, it looks really pretty because it sort of blends in but stands out quite clearly as well. Hardly anyone knows about it: it’s my own secret thing and I just sit there and look.

Jude, 7

In October, after a visit to central Asia, Italy’s prime minister […] told a meeting of the Italian national retailers association that they should “all go to Kazakhstan on holiday” because “there’s a gentleman there who is my friend. Not by coincidence, he has 91% of the vote and has done extraordinary things”.

The man he was referring to was Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been accused of, among other things, rigging elections, intimidating opponents, concentrating power in the hands of his family and altering the constitution to ensure he remains in office, which he has done for the last 19 years.

John Hooper