The Joy of Six 1252

"The experience of that Royal Commission - on long-term care for older people - is instructive. It made four major recommendations relating to: free personal care, a cap on care costs for accommodation, the establishment of national care standards, and integration of services. We are still awaiting effective action on all of these." Bob Hudson asks why social care is never fixed.

Annie Hickox on the 'toxic positivity' - the dark side of all those simple recipes for dealing with unhappiness and depression that spread so frictionlessly across social media.

Privacy International says the use of social media monitoring by government and commerce is increasingly prevalent and largely unregulated. 

Thomas Horabin held North Cornwall for the Liberal Party at a 1939 by-election, defended it in 1945 to become the only parliamentary representative of West Country Liberalism, but crossed the floor to join Labour two years later. Jaime Reynolds and Ian Hunter weigh up his maverick career.

"There was something else in the house, unmentioned and unlabelled. A sort of shadowy presence that hovered by the back door. No one referred to it, so I kept quiet, but without ever really actually seeing anything I knew it was a boy. A boy of about 10 or 12, in short trousers and a cap. I acknowledged him as I walked by, much as I would acknowledge a single magpie, with a dip of the head and a murmured incantation." Esther Freud discusses Walberswick, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ghosts.

Tom Moran shows that our false belief that Shakespeare had little knowledge of Latin and Greek - the basis of many a nutty theory about the authorship of his plays - rests on a misunderstanding of the meaning of "though" in a poem by Ben Jonson. Fascinating stuff.