Six of the Best 353

"The Conservative party today is a puritanical beast, railing against the iniquities of the world but struggling to find solutions. Like 16th-century puritans, today’s Tories take comfort in purity and isolation and want nothing to do with the murky waters of compromise politics." Giles Marshall asks how many Conservatives truly want to resist UKIP on the Tory Reform Group's Egremont blog.

"Childhood trauma and abuse is the smoking of psychiatry. As a risk factor for mental illness it is comparable to how smoking a pack of cigarettes per day increases the risk of lung cancer and heart disease." So says psychiatrist Simon Hatcher in a guest post on The Mental Elf.

Stephen Tall enjoys "This House" at the National Theatre.

"An important clue to understanding what went wrong can found in the reaction of the museum and its architect to Wednesday’s decision. In a series of angry statements the blame was pinned on ‘naive’ councillors and rabid conservationists. There was no soul-searching, no self-analysis, no sense of mea culpa."  Campaign to Save the Marquis analyses its unexpected victory over developers in Hoxton.

Gabriel Byng argues on Huffington Post that the sale of Britain's churches should cause an international outcry.

Ken Loach's "The Spirit of '45" bad history and worse politics, says David Hayes on Inside Story.