During a trip to Las Vegas to play poker during its annual World Series, he folded on what he subsequently judged a likely winning hand.

Christopher left poetry behind and has for many years been an adviser to and spokesperson for one of the richest men in the world. Brutal and cruel, cockfighting or ‘cocking’ – where two gamecocks were placed in an arena known as a cockpit and forced to attack each another to death in front of a baying crowd who bet on the outcome – was thought to have been introduced to Britain by the Romans. James I tried to legislate on some of these issues around entertainment, as did others before him,” she explains.This was about the time when I declared that if my father thought I was going to join him in the business then he would have to think again.

The beautiful game has been played for centuries in England although its origins are less than glamorous. I was six years old and my sister was eleven when our parents separated, my mother bringing us back home to London.We hear the stories of the Marquis de Dangeau, 18th-century Versailles’s wiliest card shark, right up to the experience of four-time lottery winner Joan Ginther, also known as”the luckiest woman on Earth”. He believed that if he could only maintain his composure, the various strategies and systems he dreamed up to beat the roulette wheel would one day pay off. These are questions of particular pertinence for Flusfeder, since certain members of his family would appear to have been very lucky indeed. The Minister’s Cat is where the eponymous cat is repeatedly described using adjectives beginning with specific letters of the alphabet while Reverend Crawley’s Game saw players stand in a circle and join hands, except not with a direct neighbour.