Mike Lynch’s secret: “No bureaucracy. No admin. Lots of cold pizza.”

Heroes
The family of Alain Delon, for refusing to honour his dying wish to be buried with his faithful – and very much still living – dog, Loubo. The legendary French actor, who died last Sunday and claimed to have had more than 50 dogs in his lifetime, asked that upon his death his 10-year-old Belgian Malinois be humanely killed and lain alongside him in his village cemetery. Delon’s daughter Anouchka has assured concerned fans that Loubo will live with her instead.

Villains
Welsh librarians, who are apparently so steeped in racism that the government is spending £130,000 training them how to counter the “dominant paradigm of whiteness”. The training is specifically banned from taking place in “racist” buildings, such as William Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, on the grounds that, 200 years ago, the great Liberal reformer’s father received compensation for his West Indies business interests after the abolition of slavery.

Villain
Farrow and Ball, whose eccentric and much-loved paint names are apparently not “vegan friendly”. Peta have demanded the firm “update” the names of colours that it says “normalise the exploitation of animals”, such as Dead Salmon, Smoked Trout and Potted Shrimp. The animal rights group suggests changing the colour Skimmed Milk White to Oat Milk and Dorset Cream to Dorset Vegan Cream. Elephant’s Breath and Mouse’s Back are apparently safe. For now.

The con artist who waved as she broke out of jail

Tanya Smith’s life sounds as if it was ripped straight from a thriller, says Hannah T Davies in The Guardian. In January 1988, two years into a 13-year prison sentence for masterminding a $40m bank fraud, she walked out of her cell in West Virginia and just “kept on walking”. She disguised herself as a lawyer and “floated confidently” past the security guards who observed her every move. “When I reached the gate, I turned to the guard standing in the doorway and waved,” she writes in her new memoir. “He squinted as if he was seeing someone he knew… I smiled and waved again.” It worked. She was at large for eight months before she was caught again and sentenced to 24 years behind bars.

Smith first started defrauding banks as a teenager, when she would call impersonating staff and trick them into transferring funds to her poor neighbours in Minneapolis. “I felt like it was my duty to help,” she says. She once transferred her grandmother $5,000, but the old lady assumed it was a bank error and didn’t touch the money. Although her initial intentions were good, she “got in deep” after learning to hack computers, slowly becoming “the FBI’s worst nightmare”. It took detectives decades to unpick her various scams. She says she eluded capture for so long because her pursuers never believed a black woman could be capable of orchestrating such an operation.

Never Saw Me Coming by Tanya Smith is available here. 

The French series Le Bureau des Légendes, aka The Bureau, is one of the “most purely gripping television series of the past decade”, says Alexander Larman in The Daily Telegraph. It focuses on a fictionalised version of France’s equivalent of MI6 and follows the life of Guillaume Debailly, a spy coming in from the cold after years undercover and struggling to resume his previous life. It’s the perfect mixture of “adrenaline-pumping thrills and genuinely head-scratching moral dilemmas”. The show became a “cult hit” after it first aired in 2015 but remained largely out of the mainstream as it wasn’t available on streaming services. However, it’s now making its debut on Paramount+, ahead of a much-anticipated remake produced by George Clooney and starring Michael Fassbender. The new version may be excellent, “but it’s unlikely to eclipse the sensational original.”