The Joy of Six 1576

Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome and East Somerset, has discovered what happens when a politician loses her voice: "There’s a thing about: do I seem weak now? Like, does this make me seem weaker? Which is another reason to be really clear: I will do national media, and I will carry on campaigning."

"The council’s constitution, which sets out how it is run, says it must have a cabinet and a leader at the top and this is required by UK law. The local authority is also required to have an elected member overseeing children’s services. The absence of this and the length of time the council has had no one in charge is what has led officers to make the highly unusual declaration the council is breaking the law." Edward Barnes reports from Oldham, where the elected councillors have failed to agree who should run the borough council after May's elections.

Alazne Mountjoy says women suffer because of the systemic misogyny in medical research and practice: "Women undergoing surgery are significantly more likely to experience complications, and even die, when the surgeon is a man as opposed to a woman. This is in conjunction with the fact that surgeons are overwhelmingly male, with fewer than a fifth of surgeons being female."

Anna Verhamme and John Britton, in a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute, say universities are their professional and support staff and then paying consultants more to provide these services.

"From Browne’s first instalment, featuring the character Sam Weller, sales for Pickwick rose and kept rising. Browne would go on to become Dickens’s principal illustrator, and Pickwick – helped enormously by his comic illustrations – became a literary sensation that revolutionised Victorian book publishing." Michael John Goodman looks at the relationship between Charles Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz') and reminds us how strange it is that we now publish Victorian novels without their illustrations.

"Chris Isaak has carved out a singular career doing one thing so hauntingly well, it’s become his signature. He’s built a cathedral from heartbreak and despair, lit by the flickering neon of 3 a.m. regrets, and its served him well for over four decades." James Kenney on Chris Isaak and the art of staying sad.

For International Cat Day: This is Sylvia by Sandy Wilson

One of the books I saved from my mother's house was This is Sylvia by Sandy Wilson. This review from the Brechin Advertiser (25 January 1955) explains all.

A nonsense book that is something quite new is the autobiography of that successful musical comedy star, Sylvia. Sylvia hesitated when her friends urged her to write her memoirs. She had lived her nine lives to the full, they said, so why not give her story to the public? Hester Briggs finally persuaded this great-great-granddaughter of a Sultan to take the plunge and tell her story up to now. As for the future, well as Hester said, Sylvia may only have got as far her eighth life yet. 

This is Sylvia (Max Parrish, 8/6) is the work of that remarkable young man, Sandy Wilson, who wrote the book, the lyrics and the music of the most successful musical comedy produced London for many years, The Boy Friend. As might have been expected from this talented author, This is Sylvia is like no other book, for this story of a cat of doubtful parentage, undoubted talents, ignorant but wise, popular and, of course. beautiful, embodies all that was ever meant by the successful musical comedy star the '30s and '40s. It is a candid story, full of wickedness, fashion, and foible, cunningly exposing the fatuity and elegance, follies and grace, weaknesses and strength of those who whirl among the bright lights. 

Each of the 54 illustrations, drawn Sandy Wilson himself, is a brilliant satire, and there can be few readers who will not delight in these memoirs of the recent past which he has successfully through Sylvia’s catty lips.” 

I suspect there are many contemporary references in This is Sylvia that we no longer get, but as a small boy I just loved the drawings of the cats.

Think of this post as my contribution to International Cat Day – though, strictly speaking, every day is International Cat Day.

The white horses of Lutterworth

I went to Lutterworth today and was taken by these four white horses on a grassed bank at the bottom of the town's main street, which climbs the hill from a bridge over the River Swift.

As the plaque says, they are the work of the artist and sculptor Graeme Mitcheson, who was inspired by Lutterworth's role as a staging post for the coaching trade in the 18th century.

The town council had the horses installed to mark the diamond jubilee of Elizabeth II.

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Benjamin Goodair says Andy Burnham is right to want for‑profit firms out of social care: "The majority of social care in England is run for-profit. The consequences of this go far beyond unfair profiteering. It actually worsens many of the core problems with England’s social care systems – making it less available, of worse quality and widening inequalities."

Children from poorer families do worse at school. Nadia Siddiqui explains why and what can be done to narrow the gap in attainment.

Steff Aquarone makes the case for a minister for coastal communities: "Too many coastal towns face lower than average wages, poorer transport connections, seasonal economies, shortages of affordable housing and increasing pressure from coastal erosion and climate change. Despite their enormous contribution to our economy, our heritage and our identity, they are too often overlooked when national investment decisions are made."

"Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers' fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45." Ruth Cherrington celebrates Coventry's Camley Estate.

Ben Duckett is puzzled that attendances for cricket's Hundred tournament are falling, despite the presence of more star names, reports The Sports Encounter. What he and the games administrators need to grasp is that British sports fans' attachment is to teams, not to individual players.

Claire Madge has been to see the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy: "There is no moment of finding 'madness' in Dadd's work, whether it was completed before his breakdown or after. Even the eyes of his figures from scenes of Hamlet completed in 1840 and the strange fairies that ring a sleeping Titania from 1841 show an artist with an ability to capture the uncanny and one who could easily get lost in the detail even before his psychosis came to the fore."

Richard Dadd and Victorian treatment of lunatics

Jonathan Jones wrote about the painter Richard Dadd, who spent much of his life as a patient at Broadmoor Hospital, in the Guardian earlier this week:

You can’t escape the tragedy of a gifted artist who spent so much of his life locked up, albeit in more liberal conditions than our stereotype of Victorian asylums might lead you to expect.

When I went on my guided walk around Desford in May, the guide stopped at the top of hill above the village's railway station and told us that doctors would bring patients from a local asylum by train for picnics in a nearby field. She also remarked that this isn't how we usually think of the Victorians treating what they called lunatics.

Yes, I think I may have found another myth about the Victorians – or at least a partial myth.

As I've argued before, part of the trouble is that the Victorian age lasted for more than 60 years. There's a limit to the number of useful generalisations you can make about such a long period that saw so much change. And there was both kind and brutal treatment of mental patients in the 19th century, just as there was in the 20th. Frequently they occurred side by side in the same institutions.

What you can say, I think, is that there is no simple, Whiggish tale of progress to be told here. Some of the worst abuses of such patients – lobotomy, leucotomy, electroshock – date from the 20th century, not the 19th.

While Edward Elgar began his musical career in 1879 at Powick Lunatic Asylum near Worcester. There he rehearsed and conducted the staff orchestra that played at dances for the patients and also gave concerts for their entertainment.

Another myth exploded: Queen Victoria and the lesbians

Embed from Getty Images

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 outlawed "gross indecency" between but made no mention of relations between women.

There's a story that Queen Victoria insisted that a provision about women was taken out of the act after parliament had passed it because "women could not do such things". But the story is obvious nonsense.

British monarchs have never been able to go through laws passed by parliament and strike out anything they don't like. In theory they have the power to refuse to sign a whole act, but no monarch has done that since Queen Anne.

There's another version of the story which holds that the Queen has to be consulted before a bill starts to go through parliament and no minister could face broaching the subject of lesbianism with her.

We know the Crown is consulted on new laws even today, but I doubt this version too. If the government wanted to pass a law against lesbianism, surely the minister would have talked to one of Victoria's advisers man to man and left it to him to talk to her about it. Besides, there is no evidence of such a wish on the government's part.

At the heart of this myth lies the strange picture we have of Victorian Britain. Not only were the Victorians less Victorian than we imagine, Victoria was too.

When I thought of writing this post, I remembered a story from a television documentary long ago. Victoria was opening a new wing of an art gallery or something like that, and on the way to cut the ribbon she had to pass through a gallery hung with nudes. The gallery officials tried to hurry her through it, but she stopped and said "No, I like paintings like this."

I didn't find that, but I did come across this in the Guardian (22 May 2019):

"Queen Victoria is sometimes remembered as prudish, buttoned-up and disapproving, but a new display reveals a woman well in touch with the more sensuous side of her nature.

Romantic and risqué gifts exchanged between Victoria and Prince Albert are to go on display at Osborne House, the couple’s grand seaside retreat on the Isle of Wight, which is stuffed with art and fabulous objects that the couple bought for each other.

"There is an abundance of naked flesh here at Osborne in both two and three dimensions," said Michael Hunter, an English Heritage curator.

Helped by the ITV drama Victoria, many myths about the queen have been exploded but the image of her "as an older lady dressed in black and rather miserable" persists.

The birthday gifts show a very different side. "She was open to nudity and the sensuous – more open than Albert, who perhaps surprisingly was the more prudish of the pair."

So I'm sure Victoria could have, as it were, taken lesbianism in her stride.

For other myths about the Victorians see this Liberal England post:

The Victorians didn't cover piano legs out of prudishness: that was a joke they told at the expense of straitlaced Americans. 

They didn't pose their dead relatives in family photographs and there was no such thing as Brown Windsor soup.

I've just come across another example of spurious 19th-century history: the Frozen Charlotte doll.

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"The plunder of children’s services by business is one of the big scandals of our time. Children’s homes, special schools and foster care services are increasingly run for profit. Almost every time a child is removed from their family, somebody, somewhere cashes a cheque." Martin Barrow looks at one company that received £500m from local councils last year for the care and support of children and young people.

Rory Jones finds that "England is beginning to develop a cooling divide, one in which access to protection from extreme heat increasingly depends on where people live, how much they earn and the type of home they occupy."

Does becoming a parent lead politicians to focus more on the future? Research by Chris Hanretty and Sarah Childs questions the assumption that it does: "There is no single effect of parenthood upon future focus: rather, parenthood affects men and women differently. Fatherhood causes a small increase in future focus sustained across a range of topics. ... Motherhood, by contrast, causes a decline in future focus.

"The exhibition showcased Freud’s lifelong fascination with human faces and figures, covering several different types of drawings – from pencil, pen, and ink portraits to charcoal works and etchings. In addition, several paintings were also included in the exhibition to illustrate the relationship between Freud’s works on paper and those on canvas." JacquiWine went to the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Sean Burns on Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, which bombed at the box office on release but is now recognised as a classic: "I was struck by how relevant Sweet Smell of Success seems today, when we’re seeing people who know better grovel and prostrate themselves for proximity to power on a daily basis, submitting to humiliation rituals live on cable news the way Sidney dutifully jumps to light Hunsecker's cigarettes."

Quentin Shaw on the miracle of glow worms and the threat to them from artificial light at night: "It is something of a mystery that glow worms came to be so widespread. Surveyors have noticed that the places where the beetles survive today are often sites of ancient human habitation. Perhaps people deliberately introduced them, to brighten their lives and to chase away the dark."

Joseph Wright of Derby: From the Shadows exhibition comes home

After six months at the National Gallery in London, the art exhibition Wright of Derby: From the Shadows has come home. 

It's now being shown at Derby Museum and Art Gallery and will run there until 1 November.

Its billing on the Derby Museums website says:

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows is the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist's 'candlelight' paintings. Join us as we celebrate and look again at his most admired works.

Illuminated faces gather around a variety of objects, from classical sculptures and scientific instruments to bones, bladders and animals. Through his unflinching scenes of people watching, Wright of Derby proposes moral questions about acts of looking. The strong light and deep shadows create drama, reminding us of great painters from earlier centuries like Caravaggio.

Challenging the traditionally held view of Wright of Derby as a figurehead of the Enlightenment, this exhibition contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the artist, portraying him not merely as a 'painter of light'. More than virtuoso scenes of dramatic light and shade, Wright of Derby used the night-time to explore deeper and more sombre themes, including death, melancholy, morality, scepticism and the sublime.

With over twenty works, including paintings, mezzotints, works on paper and objects, the exhibition explores both Wright of Derby’s artistic practice and the historic context of scientific and artistic development in which they were made.

Watch, along with the people he paints, as his scenes of spectacle and wonder unfold.

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows can be seen without charge at Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and you can also enjoy the large collection of his paintings that is always on show there.

Violent Bonham Carter features on Fake or Fortune?

The notorious gender-fluid London gang boss of the Sixties gets a mention in a post from last year on the Herstmonceux Castle website.

BBC’s Fake or Fortune here at the Castle

On Monday, 21st July, viewers were treated to a fascinating episode of Fake or Fortune, much of which was filmed here at Herstmonceux Castle.

We thought Dylan and Claire acquitted themselves brilliantly on camera in the garden and amongst the archives.

The episode provided insights into a painting, seemingly by Winston Churchill, of his wife Clementine, as they were staying at Hertsmonceux Castle together with his mother and Violent Bonham Carter, as guests of Claude Lowther, in the summer of 1916. 

I mentioned this to Lord Bonkers. He said that if Violent says a painting is kosher, it's prudent to agree with him.

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Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

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Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

The March of the Elephants: A Bishop’s Castle art trail

The March of the Elephants is a project to create a trail of varied elephant-inspired artworks around the town of Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire.

Why elephants in Bishop's Castle? Visit Shropshire explains one reason:

During the 18thcentury it was home to Robert Clive, better known as Clive of India, infamous for his exploits and an Indian elephant became his emblem. 

In 1781 Robert Clive’s eldest son Edward built a Market Hall for Bishop’s Castle. 

The Hall was a two-storey building with a ‘Venetian’ or three-part window on the front elevation, above which stood the carved Clive family coat of arms. 

When the Hall was knocked down, the arms were preserved and mounted in an arched stone surround and can now be seen as the monument at the top of the Square.

The website hurriedly adds that:

It should be noted that the project is purely celebrating the Town’s heritage in respect of elephants and not the life of Clive of India or imperialism in any way.

It's on safer ground when it refers to the tradition that at an elephant lived in the town during the second world war.

I had always been a bit of an elephant sceptic, but in a post that's now10 years old, I included the video above. I also quoted a Shropshire Star article about Flicks in the Sticks' Bigger Picture Archive Project, which found it.

Elizabeth-Anne Williams from the Project said:

"An interview recorded with George Evans in 2011 and archived at Bishops Castle Heritage Resource Centre reveals that when the Second World War broke out, a travelling circus had been performing in Bishops Castle with three or four elephants in their troupe. 

"The elephants required a lot of hay for feeding and when they packed up they weren’t able to take one elephant." 

George said the elephant was kept in the Castle Hotel stables, in the present car park, and he also remembered the elephant being taken for a walk past the Boys' School in Station Street where he and others gave it a swede which it 'squashed with its foot to eat it'.

And below you can see a photograph of the little square at the top of the town where the Market Hall stood. Thanks again to Duncan Smart for allowing me to use it – the post in which it first appeared was chiefly concerned with the changing of the feline guard there.

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"The taboo around the word 'membership' has been maintained not by principle but timidity. Farage built his project on lies. The least we can do is have the courage to tell the truth about what those lies have cost us in our classrooms, laboratories, training colleges, concert halls, and our standing in a world that badly needs Britain to be more than a bystander." Caroline Lucas goes where Certain Other Politicians fear to tread.

Barry Gardiner points to an important lesson of the Mandelson affair: "Most leaders surround themselves with people who tell them what they think they want to hear. Good leaders surround themselves with people who are not afraid to tell them the truth."

"Just as Hitler’s failures led him to resent the German people ever more strongly and destructively, we can expect Trump’s growing frustration to result in ever more nihilistic and destructive actions as his term moves toward its end." David R. Lurie warns about what may come next from Trump: 

Samantha Booth and Ruth Lucas report on worries that the effects of poverty and deprivation are being treating as Special Educational Needs, relocating what is a social problem in the psyches of individual children.

"The first exhibition space includes several of Eardley's social-realist figure depictions of 1950s inner-city Glaswegian children. The works have a joyful, raw, playful spirit to them, in spite of the squalid slum environment the children were living in. No artist has painted Glasgow's 'weans'  in the way that Eardley has." Blane Savage on the Joan Eardley exhibition at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two.

John Connors pays tribute to Richard Carpenter's long career in children's television from Catweazle to I Was a Rat.

Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair in conversation

When I first discovered Iain Sinclair he was obscure enough for me to feel I had him largely to myself. That notion encouraged was by the fact that his early novels – my first was White Chappell Scarlet Tracings – were published in Uppingham by Mike Goldmark.

But that was 40 years ago. Now psychogeography is no longer a novel idea and its big beasts are getting distinctly long in the tooth. So this conversation between Sinclair and Alan Moore, who has fished in the same waters, has a valedictory touch.

I used to count Moore, along with Jeremy Seabrook and Ray Gosling, as part of a post-war Northampton working-class renaissance. Now I've discovered Henry Bird, I may have to move back the date of its commencement.

Thanks to John Rogers for posting this – you can find the earlier video he refers to on this blog too. John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Down a recherché rabbit hole: More on Vaughan Wilkins's family

One of this blog's more obscure heroes is Vaughan Wilkins, a now-obscure historical novelist who had quite a following from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through him, we discovered the spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye. That's because Wilkins's son Christopher was one of its founders.

Another of Vaughan Wilkins's sons is the artist William Wilkins. His daughter Laura has published fiction under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan [and maybe under a third name too]. Powell and Vaughan are the middle names of her father and grandfather (who was christened William Vaughan Wilkins) respectively.

Vaughan Wilkins's only children's book, the interestingly of-its-period After Bath, was published in 1945. It is dedicated: "For Four Children with all my love: William, Christopher, Christine; and Richard."

So it looks as though he had at least one more child to investigate (that semicolon is intriguing), at least until the injunctions come in.

My latest article for Central Bylines: Freda Jackson and Henry Bird

"There has never been anybody like her. To say that she loved acting just would not be enough. We realised only recently when we were looking at some old clippings that newspaper banner headlines had called her London’s greatest actress."

This is the Northampton-born artist Henry Bird paying tribute to his wife Freda Jackson when she died in 1990.

My latest article for Central Bylines pays tribute to them: Northampton's arts power couple.

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The Secret Barrister argues that Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty: "Restricting trial by jury has been paraded by the government as the only way to tackle the record backlogs and delays in the Crown Courts – caused by years of chronic underfunding and political mismanagement – yet the government has produced not a shred of credible evidence to support this claim, nor is it interested in discovering any, forcing the legislation through Parliament at breakneck speed in the apparent hope of avoiding inconvenient scrutiny."

"The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them." John Oxley criticises the right's response to the Gorton and Denton by-election,

Mihai Andrei explodes the myth that wind farms massacre birds.

"When I talk to students and ask them to tell me the truth, not necessarily what they would tell their teacher, but quietly tell me whether they go on to AI when they’ve got a piece of work to do, they say 'well actually yeah please don’t tell my teacher but yes I do'." Samantha Booth reports that pupils have been confessing their sins to Ian Bauckham, the head of Ofqual.

"His paintings unnerve us as they unnerved their Baroque viewers. Caravaggio didn’t draw but painted directly onto the canvas. He invented a dramatic, overpowering chiaroscuro, a spotlit style he used to freeze the worst moments of his subjects' lives in paint. There are so many decapitations, a frankly weird number of decapitations." Erin Maglaque on the shocking art of Caravaggio.

 Grant McPhee chooses his top 15 wyrd folk albums.

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Writing in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah White says our political institutions are dangerously underprepared for a multi-party future.

Jane Green and Marta Miori argue that the electoral challenge Reform represents to Labour is widely misunderstood: "Focusing on Labour voters misses the much bigger threats to Labour from Reform, which is Reform overtaking the party in Labour councils and constituencies by continuing to capture Conservative voters and 2024 non-voters – the latter small in proportion, but currently larger in size than for other parties. This is made likelier if Labour’s vote continues to splinter broadly, to ‘undecided’ and to the left, and is a threat to the party in the many seats they won on lower vote shares in 2024 due to fragmentation on the right."

"Cambridge and Oxford are often spoken about as a pair – two high-achieving university towns with highly educated populations, cutting-edge firms and high average incomes. Both are prosperous, yet both struggle with tight housing supply. But beneath these similarities, differences are emerging." Xuanru Lin finds that Cambridge has pulled ahead of Oxford on jobs, productivity and housing.

"Historically, the psychogeographer became associated with the 'flaneur', a lone male wanderer who is able to move unheeded through the city. This romantic idyll doesn’t reflect the reality for many of us, and there are many barriers stopping folk." Morag Rose on exploring cities as a disabled woman.

Clare Bucknell visits the Joseph Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery: "Tenebrism, the 17th-century Caravaggist method of illuminating figures and details against a deeply shadowed background, was admired by connoisseurs, but little practised or understood by Wright’s British contemporaries. Mastering nocturne painting, being able to replicate the way skin glowed in warm or cool light or colours changed in the dark, was a means for the young artist to distinguish himself."

"The club whose sustained excellence made the argument for change most powerfully will now discover that the goalposts have been replaced entirely, swapped for financial sustainability assessments, commercial strength metrics, governance frameworks and geographic strategic value criteria that Ealing were never given the opportunity to meet." James White reacts to the Rugby Football Union's decision to end promotion to and relegation from the Premiership.

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Jessica Valenti sounds the alarm about the Heritage Foundation's plan for American women: "Like the conservative movement more broadly, the organisation wants young women to believe this is all being done for their benefit: that work is soulless and unfulfilling, that feminism has made women miserable, and that the real path to happiness is being a stay-at-home mom. The latest right-wing mantra for women? 'Less burnout, more babies.'"

The government’s proposed model for mandatory reporting of suspected child sexual abuse bears no resemblance to the frameworks used in the 82 per cent of countries that have enacted such legislation, argues Tom Perry.

Jonathan Cook believes the jury was right to acquit the Palestine Action defendants.

"It was the only post-war building on London’s South Bank to remain unlisted, refused protection on six separate occasions by successive culture secretaries, who since 1991 had repeatedly rejected Historic England’s (formerly English Heritage) recommendations." Richard Waite on the Listing of the South Bank Centre – that's the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery and their associated terraced walkways and stairs – after 35 years of refusals.

"The shifting appeal of The West Wing during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026?" Karrin Vasby Anderson and Nick Marx track the political drama's move from bipartisan hit to a polarised comfort watch.

Mansel Stimpson enjoyed Nouvelle Vague as I much as I did: "The casting ... which uses mainly relatively unfamiliar faces is one of the film's great successes. It is quite easy to accept Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Aubry Dullin catches the essence of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo. Even more surprisingly given that Breathless contains an iconic performance by Jean Seberg, we find this film’s best-known name, Zoey Deutch, creating a Seberg in whom we really do believe."

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"The fallout from the latest revelations has again put survivors secondary to the actions of powerful men. Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, initially declined to apologise to Epstein’s victims and distance himself from any knowledge of the financier’s sex crimes." Victims have told us the worst of Epstein’s crimes for decades – and  but they are still being ignored, says Lindsey Blumell.

Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, kidnap and deport undocumented residents. The goons soon found themselves outnumbered, as well as watched, followed, tracked and sometimes stymied by rapidly organised networks of civilians, who use text chains, plastic whistles, car horns and in one case a trombone to discomfit the would-be kidnappers and warn their potential victims."

Anna Fazackerley and Tam Patachako travel to Southend to see what happens to a city when its university closes.

"The 'laissez-faire' of free trade was ... less an ideological commitment to the free market or a desire to give free rein to rich capitalists as it was an effort to feed the poor, foster world peace and cosmopolitan friendship, and erode the baleful and unjustly got power of land-owning aristocrats." Paul Crider speaks up for Manchester Liberalism.

"She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural." Jonathan Jones goes to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum, Cardiff.

Cavan Scott encounters Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh in New York.