The Joy of Six 1181

Alwyn Turner argues that the roots of the Daleks are to be found in the second world war: "That night 165 people were killed, hundreds of houses were destroyed and Llandaff Cathedral was so badly damaged that it was closed for the next 15 months. A couple of hundred yards from the cathedral, ten-year-old Terry Nation was alone in an Anderson shelter. ... He spent that night and many others sheltering from the Luftwaffe’s bombs on his own, reading adventure stories and listening to incongruously cheerful programmes on the radio."

"The Conservatives now have a choice, they’ve even invented a new buzzword ‘headroom’, to describe the leeway they have. They could reject that Faragist populism wholesale and address the problems that confront people every day – food inflation, high rents/mortgages, bus and train cuts, crumbling public buildings – but they actively choose not to." Matthew Pennell says Rishi Sunak has brought with him  bad working practices from the corporate world and transferred them into the public affairs realm.

Municipal Dreams on the London County Council's open-air schools for delicate children.

Rose Staveley-Wadham looks at how the press covered the story during the Loch Ness Monster boom of the 1930s.

"Exploring the Midlands slowly and meticulously on foot also leads to other schemas materialising for dividing up the region. The jokey local name 'Banburyshire' for the uplands, partly in the Cotswolds, in the far south of Warwickshire, south western Northamptonshire and northern Oxfordshire, turns out to have a lot of grounding in topographical fact." Josh Allen introduces his no-cars-required walking guide to the English Midlands.

"Lewis works with analogies all the time – and the older you are of course, the more transparent the analogy.  In some ways, reading Narnia books as an adult makes you actually nostalgic for an age when you saw 'through a glass darkly'." Conrad Brunstrom reread C.S. Lewis's Narnia books during Covid lockdown.