The Joy of Six 1459

"For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth – and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists ... many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments." To understand JD Vance, you need to meet the TheoBros, says Kiera Butler.

Martin Barrow finds that Labour's reforms of the care system are an admission that privatisation of children's homes and foster care is here to stay: "Now responsibility for where children in care live is to be removed from local councils altogether and handed to a regional body with tenuous local roots tasked with negotiating the best financial terms with private providers."

"We talk endlessly about 'local pride', yet whenever regions like Cornwall, the north east, or Yorkshire try to express that pride politically or administratively, someone in Westminster clears their throat and steers the conversation back to something safer: 'Englishness'. As if being Cornish, Geordie, or Yorkshire were a distraction rather than part of the story." Regional identity still matters, argues John Hall, but without power and respect risks being reduced to a souvenir.

Eleanor Grant reports that lawfare is stifling student politics at Oxford: "One scandal after another, each matched by an internal, quasi-legal tribunal, has now threatened to sink the Oxford Union and a series of student articles chronicling these escapades have mysteriously vanished after short-lived publication."

Casmilus watches Rock Follies, the Seventies television series about an all-woman band that starred Charlotte Cornwell, Rula Lenska and Julie Covington.

"It’s got one of the most famous opening lines of any Murdoch novel, which takes a lot from Austen: 'Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.'" Miles Leeson chooses Iris Murdoch's five best novels.