Six of the Best 293

Writing in the Guardian, Clare Allan draws an important moral from the Savile affair: "The various inquiries into how he was able to continue his behaviour unchecked are likely to take some time. We don't need to wait for an inquiry, however, to tell us the most immediate and obvious truth: it is crucial to listen to people whose word it is easy to dismiss."

On the Wired Danger room site Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan examine the Kremlin's increasing surveillance of the internet.

The writer of Feeding My Intolerant Child feels the NHS has let her down. So she wrote to her MP. Trouble is, her MP is currently in Australia appearing in a reality television show.

Five Chinese Crackers unpicks an article by James Delingpole to demonstrate a number of common logical fallacies.

"The Normans called the guerrilla movement that resisted them after 1066 the ‘silvatici’ — the men of the woods. The English, it is said, called them the same thing in their own language: green men ... How would you show your loathing of them without attracting a penalty? Perhaps you would carve the face of a green man inside the church: perhaps you would bring the spirit of the silvatici into the temple of the enemy." Writing on Aeon Paul Kingsnorth, fancifully but intriguingly, suggests that the Green Men you find carved in Medieval churches were a symbol of Saxon resistance to the Norman yoke.

Spitalfields Life presents some vintage photographs celebrating the high days and holidays of old London.