Fake reasons for leaving jobs, manipulated dates and inflated titles among most frequent falsehoods

In 28 years of recruitment, Matt Collingwood has witnessed some “very awkward” job interviews. Like the candidate whose CV falsely boasted of a second-dan black belt in taekwondo, only to discover his interviewer was an aficionado of the sport. “An interview that should have been an hour lasted 15 minutes,” said Collingwood, the managing director of the IT recruitment agency Viqu.

Or the candidate who claimed he had attended a certain private school, which his interviewer had also attended and would have been in the year above. But when asked for teachers’ names, the school motto, even where the sports field was, “he was clueless. Didn’t get the job.”

Half a century on from the sublimely ridiculous Tommy, the passionate abandon that distinguished Russell’s films – from composer biopics to the infamous The Devils, among other bonkers oddities – is needed now more than ever

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of one of the most important and groundbreaking pop movies of all time: Ken Russell’s psychedelic screen adaptation of the Who’s rock opera Tommy (1975). Marketed with the eye-catching tag lines “Your senses will never be the same” and “He will tear your soul apart”, the film starred Roger Daltrey as the traumatised kid who becomes a Pinball Wizard and (more importantly) a cult messiah.

Blending themes to which Russell would return throughout his career (the transformative power of music; the alchemical madness of genius; the dark power of false religion), Tommy was a typically wild ride that swung between the sublime and the ridiculous. Among its most memorable set pieces were Elton John in mile-high bovver boots getting trashed at the pinball table; Tina Turner’s Acid Queen blowing Daltrey’s mind with a hallucinogenic Metropolis-style robot suit filled with needles and snakes; and Oscar-nominated Ann-Margret writhing in a sea of washing powder foam and baked beans that spews from her exploding television set. Pete Townshend earned an Academy Award nomination for the film’s music, intended to be played in an ear-bleeding Quintaphonic sound mix for which most cinemas were totally unprepared (Russell told me on multiple occasions that very few audiences who saw Tommy heard the movie the way it was intended).

For more than 50 years I’ve revelled in the epic courage of boxing. But deaths, gangsterism and sportswashing have made it much harder to love

When I was a boy, living in South Africa, I fell for Muhammad Ali. As graceful as he was provocative, Ali amazed me with his uncanny ability, despite apartheid, to entrance black and white South Africans. He made us laugh and dazzled us with his outrageous skill and courage. I have followed boxing ever since, often obsessively, for more than 50 years.

In 1996, after I spent five years tracking Mike Tyson, James Toney, Roy Jones Jr, Chris Eubank Sr and Naseem Hamed, my book Dark Trade allowed me to become a full-time writer. I owe this gift to boxing but our relationship is not easy. Boxing is as crooked and destructive as it is magnificent and transformative.

Exclusive: Bronze cast of Christ connected to Florentine artist to be sold alongside Spanish masterpiece

A precociously talented artist, scarcely out of his teens, was in 1620 commissioned to paint the portrait of an intrepid nun passing through his home city of Seville on her way to one of the farthest outposts of Spain’s vast empire.

His painting reveals a shrewd, formidable woman in late middle age, who clasps a book in her left hand while wielding a crucifix, almost as if it were a weapon, in her right.

Despite wet weather hitting yields, supermarkets are reporting a doubling in rhubarb sales compared to last year

It takes a while for the eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the shed. Slowly, the shapes of hundreds of pale stalks emerge from the gloom like an alien species, visible only by the glow cast by a handful of candles.

This candlelit ritual is the harvest of Yorkshire forced rhubarb, being carried out by growers Robert and Paula Tomlinson.

The Sky Sports pundit deserves an award for his accurate assessment of India’s Champions Trophy gerrymandering

I believe the robots are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside – let the robots’ laughter remind us how we used to be. The Onion, there, prescient as ever, 25 years on.

May I also say at this point that in a time of industrial-scale sporting bullshit telling the truth is, more than ever, a revolutionary act, all the more so when it involves standing in front of a camera in a rumpled ice-blue blazer, eyes blazing with righteous carved wooden woodpecker fury.