Six of the Best 497

Colin Talbot gets it right on the imposition of a new mayor on Greater Manchester: "The proposed changes ... have all the hall marks of a policy being made on-the-hoof, behind closed doors, by small groups of like-minded people – just the sort of ingredients identified by King and Crewe which lead to monumental blunders."

Wages are decided by the market? Nonsense, says Stumbling and Mumbling: they are social constructs.

" One of the problems about getting economic policy-makers in a room together is that you sink immediately into acronym hell." David Boyle reports on a seminar he organised at the Treasury.

"The Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian epochs are awash with visionaries who have helped sculpture landscape sensibilities ever since. Titans for whom a surname is all that is required: Blake, Dickens and Darwin; Turner and Constable; Tennyson, Wordsworth and Keats; the Bronte's and Hardy; Kipling, Conan-Doyle and Buchan; Ruskin and Morris; Emerson, Muir and Thoreau." Eddie Procter looks towards a new landscape aesthetic.

The East End on Britain's worst civilian disaster of World War II. A total of 173 men, women and children lost their lives in a crush on the stairs at Bethnal Green tube station.

The Sound of Music premiered to horrific reviews in 1965. Now it’s the most beloved and popular movie musical ever. Kevin Fallon looks at how it climbed a mountain.