Pick of the week’s Gossip

When the historian Tom Holland heard that the world’s largest cricket ground, in Ahmedabad, had been renamed The Narendra Modi Stadium after India’s PM, he posted a sarcastic tweet praising Modi’s “modesty”. The tweet had an accidental side-effect, leading thousands of Indian social media users to vow to boycott Spider-Man – the forthcoming Marvel film starring the actor Tom Holland ( above). “Oh dear,” the historian posted later. “I seem single-handedly to have destroyed prospects for the next Spider-Man in India.”

The politician-turned-journalist George Osborne writes in The Spectator that he is going into banking “to do something that’s a bit more popular”. He also explains that he has gone right off nightclubs, due to an embarrassing incident that took place in one last year. He was out with his 16-year-old daughter for New Year’s Eve during a skiing trip. Long after midnight, “I approached her from behind on the dance floor, put my hands on her shoulders and said: ‘Come on, darling, it’s time I took you to bed.’ Except I got the wrong person. It wasn’t my daughter. It was a royal princess.”

When Sir David Suchet began training at Lamda, he wasn’t au fait with the acting world: he hadn’t grown up around actors, and turned up on his first day, straight from boarding school, in a suit and tie. He was mocked by teachers who made him sit in the middle of a circle and pretend to be a baby. Things got even worse at his first movement class – when he saw that everyone else was in leotards. “I didn’t know what a movement class was,” he says. “So I wore my rugby kit.”