The Joy of Six 1597

"More than 260 peers hold multiple, individual shareholdings – stakes in listed companies – worth more than £100,000 apiece. In fact, some Lords held more than 200 individual holdings, each valued in excess of £100,000. Even assuming each asset was only worth £100,000, that would put the combined value of those shareholdings alone at more than £22 million." Huw Macartney finds the House of Lords has gone from aristocracy to assetocracy.

Nathan Levy on the need for politicians to reject short-term thinking: "The people who aren't in the comments are those we need to hear from more often: the 24-year-old renting a room in a shared house, the parent of a toddler who hasn't slept since 2024, the teenager who'll be living with whatever we decide for the next sixty years."

The all-male outcome of this year’s scientific Nobel Prize awards has reignited questions around how the winners are chosen and what it reveals about gender inequities in academia, reports Katharine Sanderson.

"There may be nothing more detrimental to public understanding of complexity than an idiom or analogy that’s elegant, cutely worded, and wrong." When it comes to dealing with Russia, Dmitry Grozoubinski hates the expression "poking the bear".

Ian Penman asks where Anthony Burgess's reputation stands today: "It’s hard to judge Burgess's current standing. He doesn't seem a likely candidate for a revival. I've heard him dismissed as sexist and homophobic, a relic. He is a strange mix of the old-fashioned and the modernist – an old-fashioned modernist – typified by two of the figures he devoted studies to: Joyce and Lawrence."

Elizabeth Rayne considers new research on who sees ghostly apparitions and why.