Six of the Best 879

"My favourite saying about spads is that the best are like poisoners: either well-known, or good at their job, but never both." Dominic Cummings had better hope he is the exception, says Freethinking Economist.

Simon McGrath says it's time for the Lib Dems to ditch the People's Vote organisation but not the idea of a people's vote.

"Percy Bysshe Shelley was many things: a poet, a political radical and pamphleteer, a philosophical thinker, and a faithless husband. He was also – and this may come as a surprise – obsessed with the occult." Lynn Shepherd looks at he haunting of the great Romantic poet.

Paul Carnahan remembers interviewing Ivor Cutler.

A London Inheritance shares a 1940s' bike ride from Marble Arch to Shrewsbury.

"Something about it struck me as utterly melancholy – who, when they are eight or nine years old, wants to spend hours driving up and down in a fogged-up bus looking at the same industrial estates, hedgerows and bus stations?" Ray Newman on the genesis of his new novel The Grave Digger’s Boy.