The Joy of Six 1274

Anthony Broxton looks back to Neil Kinnock's speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference - and gives us a sense of the leadership the Conservatives now need but won't get: "In just one passage of speech, Kinnock flipped the trajectory of the party and, most importantly, the dynamics of party conference on its head. The left - for so long used to a monopoly on the righteous anger of leadership betrayal - was now being told to wear their own failures of the working class."

"A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbours." Anne Applebaum says Russia must be defeated.

"It is now indisputable that companies rigged safety tests with the complicity of the testing authorities, that politicians refused to act on safety concerns because to do so might have obstructed deregulation, that a social landlord which loathed its tenants ignored and concealed fire safety notices." James Butler reads the report of the Grenfell Inquiry.

Marlow Bushman reports that red squirrels are repopulating Aberdeen city centre.

"Few authors manage to publish bestsellers in one decade, let alone six. Agatha Christie managed to accomplish that feat, selling enormous quantities of her books throughout her career. Christie’s popularity kept growing throughout her life, but the settings of her novels changed with the times. When many people think of Christie’s books, they think of the interwar period, country estates, and quaint English villages; but during the 1960s Christie’s stories don’t fit these templates at all." Christie in the 1960s looks at her novels from that decade.

Books on the Line on the Crumlin Viaduct and the filming there of the 1966 Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren film Arabesque.