Six of the Best 187

The winners of this year's Liberal Democrat Voice Blog of the Year Awards can be found on Lib Dem Voice. Congratulations all round.

But, as Liberal Burblings points out, most of the previous winners are no longer blogging, or at least no longer blogging in their own right. It seems the Curse of the BOTYs (which I can claim to have discovered) is still in operation. I have some ideas why this is so, which I may share in a separate post some time.

A link to David Boyle and Simon Titley's Really Facing the Future - on sale from the Liberator stall at Birmingham - can be found on Living on Words Alone.

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist considers the poison pen of Johann Hari.

Did Charles Dickens have a real-life model in mind when he created the Artful Dodger? The Sun suggests that he did. (Don't worry about enjoying this article: it's the Daily Mail you have to be snobbish about these days.)

Sibling of Daedalus reveals that Gillian Hills played the juvenile lead in both the film Beat Girl (1960) and the 1969 television adaptation of Alan Garner's The Owl Service. Not only that: she found time to appear in Blow-up and A Clockwork Orange too.