The Joy of Six 1269

"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.