The Joy of Six 1317

"Regulation is one of those words used by politicians that is nearly always bad in the abstract and good in the specific. They rail against bureaucracy, red tape and pettifogging rules that get in the way of innovation and efficiency. But the moment something bad happens, they immediately accept that more regulation is the only way to avoid a recurrence." Sam Freedman explains why governments struggle to turn anti-regulation rhetoric into an agenda for the real world.

Peter Jukes says Russia'a information warfare primed the world for Trump and Musk: "There has been a decade-long war against ‘one person, one vote’, and the concept of a transparent media to inform our citizenry. If we are ever to protect our democracies from this synergy of autocracy and tech, we will have to unravel these alliances of money and information and their traffic of hatred and falsehood."

Ginny Smith on the battle to retain village life in Sussex: "There are many examples ... of villages where people have come together to fight the 'hollowing out' of their community. They have clubbed together to buy the local pub or village shop, they have fought the threatened closure of their school, raised funds to build a village hall and created community orchards and wild spaces."

"'What I tell you now doesn’t go past this room,' the colonel said. 'You’re going to London on Saturday on the boat-train, and you’ll be playing at Churchill’s funeral.' 'But he’s not dead,' protested King, and the colonel replied: 'He will be by Sunday.'" Alwyn Turner recalls the trumpeters who played at Churchill's funeral.

It was only possible to begin production of The Mirror and the Light - the third part of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy - when the producer, writer, director and  leading actor gave up a significant proportion of their fees, Ellise Shafer reports on the economics of quality television.

Sven Mikulec watches the Coen brothers' first film, Blood Simple (1984).