The Joy of Six 1398

Denis Mikhailov, a Russian dissident lawyer now exiled to Poland, explains how Trump’s generosity to Putin only entrenches his tyranny: "For Putin, this meeting was not a platform for negotiations, but above all an instrument of political legitimisation. On the one hand, it was an opportunity to show the world that he is still being received, that he is capable of holding dialogue on equal terms with the President of the United States, despite the warrant of the International Criminal Court and his de facto political isolation."

"Your politically engaged supporters inhabit the networks where these narratives form. They populate the WhatsApp groups, the comment sections, the office conversations where political meaning gets made. When you demoralise them, you surrender these spaces to your opponents. The passionate few shape the context in which everyone else encounters politics." AE Snow discusses the government's failure to get its message across. 

Magda Osman says that though laws are being introduced across the world to reduce 'psychological harm' experienced online, there is no clear definition of what it is.

"Pubs help people feel connected to a local place. When they close, they can become sites of mourning, a painful reminder of change and decline. One resident of a former colliery village in Nottinghamshire said of the pub she had once worked in – now derelict, fire damaged and vandalised as it awaits redevelopment – that despite her wish that it had remained open it was now better to 'knock it down' to 'put us out of our misery'." Thomas Thurnell-Read and Robert Deakin have researched what is lost when pubs close.

"As editor of The Nation in Trinidad during the 1950s, C.L.R. James campaigned for the Barbadian Frank Worrell to be appointed as the first full-time black captain. The selectors' 'whole point was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain', James later wrote in Beyond a Boundary." Tim Wigmore on race, cricket and the history of the West Indies.

Dave Haslam champions a forgotten film  - The White Bus: "Scripted by Shelagh Delaney in 1965, it’s directed by Lindsay Anderson. The cast includes a very young Anthony Hopkins, and Arthur Lowe who had already played a role in Coronation Street but would go on to star as Captain Mainwaring in the hit TV series Dad’s Army."