Sammy Going South, Suez and the end of the British Empire

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

We British have a habit of turning military debacles into victories. The retreat from Dunkirk, for instance, has twice been the subject of a film (in 1958 and 2017) and also forms an important part of the action in Atonement from 2007.

But the Suez Crisis of 1956, whether because of the deceit it involved or its abject failure, has proved too shameful a subject for British cinema to tackle. This unsuccessful attempt to overturn Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, made together with France and Israel, and in particular the way we were forced to back down by a threat from the United States to spark a run on the pound, marked the end of British illusions that is could remain an imperial power in the postwar world.

So it’s notable that there is a British film that begins amid the British bombing of Port Said. But, of a piece with the doomed Suez operation as a whole, that bombing kills the parents of a 10-year-old British boy, Sammy Hartland. Finding no help in a suddenly hostile town, the boy sets off, with no concept of the distance involved, to walk to his only relative, an aunt who lives in Durban in South Africa. 

Released in 1963, Sammy Going South was based on a novel of the same name by W.T. Canaway, who had quite a reputation in the Sixties and Seventies, and also had a writing credit for The Ipcress File (1965), but seems forgotten today.

Alexander Mackendrick

It was the first film that its director Alexander Mackendrick had completed for six years. After reeling off some of the best films Ealing Studios was to make – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy, The Ladykillers – he went to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Though it now has a towering critical reputation, it bombed on release and Mackendrick was then taken off two pictures that he had begun to direct – The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone.

Mackendrick, who badly needed to complete another film, then went back to work for his old Ealing boss Sir Michael Balcon (the grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis), who was now the head of Bryanston Films. But there turned out to be a chasm between their views of what their adaptation of Sammy Going South should look like.

As Mark Duguid has written:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

You might say that for Mackendrick, Sammy was another of the lethal innocents in whom he rather specialised – think of the chaos that Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers and Alec Guinness’s manic scientist in The Man in the White Suit provoke around them.

One result of these tensions was that Mackendrick’s original cut, which came in at over three hours, was reduced by Balcon to 128 minutes before release. The version that is shown from time to time on British television, and was released on DVD in 2010, is 10 minutes shorter still – no one seems to know quite when or why this further cut was made. 

A surprising amount of the strangeness and cruelty that Mackendrick found in Canaway’s novel survived into what was marketed as a family film. Within the first 25 minutes, Sammy has lost both his parents, been seized upon by a pedlar who clearly has sexual designs on him, and then found himself handcuffed to the man’s corpse.

As he makes his way south, Sammy is variously helped or hindered by the adults he meets. After a trek across the desert, first with the pedlar and then alone, he is taken up by a rich American woman. He runs away from her when he finds she wants to take him north with her, and then falls in with a group of Sudanese Muslims returning from the haj. 

The pilgrims’ leader, played by a stern Orlando Martins, is the only adult the boy meets in the early part of his journey who cares for him without selfish motives, but the boy abandons him for a Greek journalist who says he will take him to his aunt – and has ambitions to sell his story. The boy comes to distrust him and eventually runs away again.

Then, alone in the bush, Sammy is happened upon by a diamond smuggler played by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance and touching relationship with the boy will be what many viewers remember from the film. 

It looks as though the boy will stay with him permanently, but Robinson’s camp is broken up by the authorities and Sammy makes his way to his aunt alone. Quite how he manages this is skipped over, but in the novel he travels by light plane and train, and still has to fight off a bounty hunter at Durban station.

How Sammy became too happy

The success or failure of the film obviously relied to a great extent upon the casting of Sammy, and Mackendrick thought he had struck gold in Fergus McClelland, the 11-year-old son of Northern Irish actor Alan McClelland who, among many other roles, was in the original cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap alongside Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim. 

Mackendrick, quoted in Philip Kerr’s biography of the director, said of him, with alarming objectivity: 

"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting."

But something happened which explains why McClelland, who is convincingly ragged and itchy in his scenes with Orlando Martins, appears so happy and healthy when he meets Edward G. Robinson after trekking through the bush:

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

Mackendrick’s treatment of the boy during filming was as hard-hearted as his approach to casting. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s The Film Programme in 2010, McClelland recalled the unit doctor telling the director at one point that he had to decide whether he wanted “a dead star or a live little boy”.

Some critics complained that McClelland’s acting was wooden until he met Edward G. Robinson, but this is not the first time a child actor had been blamed for following their director’s instructions. Preparing to shoot the film, Mackendrick had been to institutions to study traumatised and orphaned children, and this woodenness was what he saw in in them. McClelland was to go on acting for some years, appearing in both television plays and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so other directors appreciated his talents too.

Edward G. Robinson and Harry H. Corbett

Mackendrick faced greater problems than his young lead becoming too happy and well fed: Edward G. Robinson suffered a serious heart attack early in the filming of his role. The result was that many of his scenes with the boy were shot with the participants being on different continents. 

Fergus McClelland was filmed in Africa, with Mackendrick reading the other part, and Edward G. Robinson in a studio in London, with Mackendrick this time reading the boy’s lines. It’s a mark of the director’s skill that these scenes are still so convincing and moving.

Another actor who deserves a mention is Harry H. Corbett, who plays Edward G. Robinson’s associate in the diamond smuggling game. Corbett had already made one series of Steptoe and Son, the classic BBC sitcom that was to make him a household name – soon every impersonator on television had to be able to take him off – but arguably blight his career. 

Before Steptoe, Corbett was called “the British Brando” by some, because he was a Method actor, and was the star Shakespearian in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East.

Fergus McClelland later became a voiceover artist and a trainer in business presentation, so there are plenty of his videos to be found online. In one of them, he recalls that Corbett did not talk to the other cast members much, but was friendly to him – the boy was allowed to call him “H.” 

Corbett told him that he didn’t plan on doing a second series of the comedy, but perhaps even one had fixed him in the public mind as Harold Steptoe and Harold Steptoe alone. One review of Sammy Going South referred to his “Steptoe accent”, as though it already counted against him as a serious actor.

Racial politics

The racial politics of Sammy Going South are muted: there is, for instance, no suggestion that by 1963 South Africa was a tainted haven for the boy to seek. Orlando Martins is allowed great dignity and Sammy is shown to need and appreciate his paternal authority. And, as a returning haji he appreciates that the boy is on a pilgrimage of his own. 

Beyond Martins, however, there is no other substantial Black character in a film set in entirely in Africa. The men who work for Edward G. Robinson are at least shown as a benign presence, singing a lullaby when the boy wakes suddenly in the back of their jeep.

It is the Greek journalist who suffers the worst stereotyping, particularly from the British officials, who still administrate Robinson’s part of East Africa. Those officials are verging on the comic themselves, and this is certainly no celebration of British Africa. 

The fact that Robinson has drawn for years on fuel dumps the Germans abandoned in 1918 suggests that the European presence in Africa is drawing to a close, something his character explicitly says. That wasn’t to stop Britain’s private schools turning out ideal types to run the Empire for two or three decades after it ceased to exist.

Sammy goes west

I can’t argue that Sammy Going South is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is better than its reputation and is interesting in so many ways. As a study of childhood trauma and recovery; as a document of the last days of the British Empire; and as a film by one of Britain’s best directors, who was soon to give up making films and devote himself to teaching instead.

The film was trimmed yet again for the US market, given a new title (the ludicrous, to my eyes, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) and a new soundtrack. Joe Dante even claims that this version is better than the original: I’ve not seen it, but the omission of most of Orlando Martins’s scenes makes that sound unlikely. 

But I can at least show you the trailer for this version. I wonder if Steven Spielberg saw A Boy Ten Feet Tall: am I alone in being reminded of Empire of the Sun by the scene of the boy amid the bombing of Port Said?

I suspect this American version is closer to what Michael Balcon had hoped for from the shoot. Me? I mourn Mackendrick’s lost, darker three-hour version.

Work, play and creativity: Another column for the JCPCP

This is another of the quarterly 'Sighcology' columns I contribute to the  Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Work, play and creativity

An overexcited website selling business courses tells us:

It’s easy to play it safe. To follow the rules and optimise what already exists. In a world of constant change, sensible can feel smart. Until it stops working. You see, logic will get you to the starting line – but only creativity will win you the race.

 That's why we believe creativity is the most valuable capability for growth. And it’s something that you can learn, practise and embed in every area of life. 

And another devoted to resources for creativity says:

We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.

Does this mean that we can all regress into childhood and that making mistakes or behaving foolishly does not matter? Of course not. What we mean in this context is that a certain degree of chaos, learning from mistakes and not playing by the rules is acceptable.

The link between creativity and childhood play in adulthood has indeed been studied by psychologists, with Sandra Russ publishing a book confidently titled Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity. But I wonder if children’s play is as anarchic as the business world makes it sound?

There are philosophers who saw play differently. Michel de Montaigne wrote that “it should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.” Nietzsche agreed, saying man’s maturity is “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play”.

And if you don’t trust philosophy, listen to the young protagonists of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which appeared in 1882 as a three-volume adult novel but was later repurposed as a children’s classic. The two boys explore the farms and reservoir around their homes with heads full of adventure stories, and everything they see or do has to be reimagined in the light of them. They even have to reimagine themselves:

“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.

“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”

*****

W.H. Auden displayed a map of Alston Moor in the study of his home on Fire Island, near New York. The landscape of decaying lead mines it pictured had haunted his early poetry, and before that his childhood imaginings. Between the ages of six and twelve, he recalled, he devoted much of his waking thought to “the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining”.

There were, however, rules. His was a Meccano world, not a Minecraft one:

I decided, or rather, without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy. In choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects in the primary world, to choose, for example, between two kinds of water turbine ... I was not allowed to invent one.

He was faced with just such a choice between machines:

One type I found more sacred or “beautiful”, but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference to reality or truth.

The child was father to the poet, because you can see the same morality at work in Auden’s growing dissatisfaction with one of his most celebrated poems, “September 1, 1939”. He omitted two stanzas from its first publication and became increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion that “We must love one another or die.” 

"Between you and me,” he wrote to a critic in 1957, “I loathe that poem.” He found it too flattering both to him and to his readers, and changed its final line in later printings to “We must love one another and die,” but mostly he refused permission for it to appear at all.

******

So maybe children’s play is not the free-for-all its enthusiasts in the world of business courses assume but has rules that adults are too busy or sentimental to notice. And maybe they have got creativity wrong too.

The classic way of measuring creativity is the Alternative Uses Test which presents the subject with a simple object – a brick is a favourite choice – and asks them to think of as many uses for it as possible in a set time. But this seems a limited view of what creativity consists in. Isn’t it more social than that? As far as brainstorming works in business – and there seems a consensus that it’s not far at all – it’s not because someone in the room says something brilliant: it works because they say something silly, someone else turns it on its head and a third person realises that there might be something useful here.

Solitariness can be the enemy of creativity. In the days when my political party published a weekly newspaper, I would often find myself at our annual conference and being asked to write a column for it in a couple of hours, only to find that I didn’t have an idea in my head. The secret was not to sit there and think harder: it was to get away from the screen for half an hour and go for a wander around the trade stands and the stalls run by party groups. 

I would have a chat with someone, pick up a piece of gossip from an old friend and a handful of leaflets about good causes. I might end up using little of what I had gleaned, but when I got back to the newspaper’s office the gears were whirring again and the column wrote itself.

Five reasons to stop our sending future leaders to boarding school

Piers Cross blends the psychological and the political to produce a convincing list.

I wrote about Richard Beard's book Sad Little Men in my first column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. I like its original subtitle 'Private schools and the ruin of England'.

The Joy of Six 1560

"Every week I read of people seeking planning permission for children’s homes whose backgrounds are in real estate, building, motor dealerships, pubs, caravan parks and light engineering. The one thing they don’t have is experience in the care of children and young people." Illegal children’s homes are thriving because profit has broken the care system. argues Martin Barrow.

Russell Brandom says Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto shows exactly why people don’t like AI: "Even as Zuckerberg tries to paint a picture of the wonderful future abundant superintelligence will bring, he keeps reminding us of all the ways it’s likely to go wrong."

Erin Clabough on the reasons for student anxiety: "Grades aren’t the only source of pressure that students experience. Social comparison plays a role, too, along with the pressure to only answer questions when they’re already sure, to never seem confused and to stay constantly productive. Based on my experience and research, kids pick up on the message that they should keep their curiosity at a 5 out of 10 scale, instead of a 10 out of 10, especially if it strays outside the curriculum."

"The web had not yet become a pure retrieval machine. It still had a culture of exploration, and many services were designed to help users browse topical categories rather than fire a query into a universal index. In that world, a webring or directory was not a compromise. It was often the main event." Alan Bradley remembers life before Google.

"The suits don’t own cricket. The suits just manage the top floor. The soul of the game lives right here on the grass, kept alive by the people who simply care too much to let it go. And as long as there’s a Saturday afternoon, a cold drink, and a game to watch at Barnes, my heart isn’t going anywhere else." Elizabeth Ammon loves club cricket.

Nathen Amin travels to Lisbon on the trail of Perkin Warbeck.

The uncanny on the western front in the first world war

Embed from Getty Images

Malcolm Gaskill reviews A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War by Owen Davies in the London Review of Books (4 July 2019):

It’s a well-known story that British soldiers at Mons claimed they really did see angels – but that story, too, turns out to be unfounded. In September 1914 the Welsh writer Arthur Machen published a story called The Bowmen in the London Evening News. In it, spectral archers from the Battle of Agincourt come to the aid of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. 

To his dismay the story was widely taken as truth, and a "snowball of rumour" hardened into "the solidest of facts". "If I had failed in the art of letters," Machen wrote later, "I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit."

It’s ironic that the Great War’s most famous supernatural story was the creation of Arthur Machen when there were so many real reports of supernatural phenomena on the front line. In A Supernatural War, Owen Davies leads us from the conflict into a haunted world filled with magical thinking and uncanny experiences.

And the angels of Mons were only one of many encounters with the uncanny during the war:

From the outbreak of war, tales of the uncanny abounded. French Catholic troops at the Battle of the Marne and Russian Orthodox troops at the Battle of Augustov reported seeing the Virgin Mary. "Sport is more in my line than Spiritualism," a British officer wounded at Mons remarked, "but when you have experiences brought under your very nose again and again, you cannot help thinking that there must be something in such things."

Battlefield apparitions were nothing new: Roman legionaries saw Castor and Pollux; troops fighting in the Crimean War saw saints. Walter Scott thought this perfectly natural: "One warrior catches the idea from another; all are alike eager to acknowledge the present miracle, and the battle is won before the mistake is discovered." What made the First World War different was not just its mechanised slaughter, but the way it slammed together old and new habits of thought.

Nascent disciplines like psychology, sociology and social anthropology were quick to identify atavistic traits in 20th-century people. Granville Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, thought the Angels of Mons a fascinating expression of societal stress. "No war," he said, "was ever so hard on the nerves." 

The French historian Marc Bloch was thrilled to observe in the trenches "a wonderful renewal of oral tradition". Men moving up and down the line would exchange a few words, often passing on rumours that were groundless but hugely significant for the hearers.

There's more about the angels of Mons in an article by Dr Miriam Bibby on Historic UK.

The Joy of Six 1555

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.

Peter Knight on making sense of conspiracy theories

Professor Peter Knight gave this lecture on Making Sense of Conspiracy Theories at Gresham College, London, on 14 November 2024. You can download the full text, including academic references, from the college website: 

A common misconception is that belief in conspiracy theories is the result of a lack of accurate information or the circulation of mistaken information, whether accidental or deliberate. The assumption is that no one in their right mind would believe in such bizarre claims, unless they were the victims of a concerted campaign of deception and manipulation The idea is that people are fundamentally rational, and that they will adjust their beliefs when new evidence comes to life. And the implication is that if only we can transmit the correct information, then the mistaken belief will disappear.

But the reality in many cases is that misinformation doesn't turn people into conspiracy theorists. Instead, conspiracy theories often provide people with ready-made narrative justifications for identity positions they have already assumed. Although the usual picture of a conspiracy theorist is a loner, the process of developing conspiracy interpretations in online communities can give people a sense of community, purpose and belonging. Conspiracy theories need to be understood as collective, sensemaking narratives that help bolster worldviews, rather than as pieces of misleading information that alter individual beliefs.

The Joy of Six 1534

Keir Starmer should set a timetable for his departure from Number 10 and give his successor the opportunity to prepare for becoming prime minister, argue Hannah White and Alex Thomas.

"Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs." Lisa M. Given on what Britain can learn from Australia's attempt to ban under-16s from social media.

Ben Mayfield has seen a new film on the countryside access debate in England and Wales: "Our Land is a title with two meanings – private land ownership for the landowners v the campaign for shared rights in land. The film explores different attitudes to ownership as well as the physical borders between landowners and, in the words of access campaigner and contributor Guy Shrubsole, 'the peasants'."

John Drury names six mistaken ideas in crowd psychology that refuse to die: de-individuation, groupthink, mass panic, contagion, the hooligan, mob mentality.

"Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain." Boyd Tonkin pays tribute to Edwin and Willa Muir, whose translations made the work of Franz Kafka available to the English-speaking world.

David Hewitt looks back to Oxfam Walk '69 and Wembley Stadium's first concert: "Four-fifths of those who started the walk managed to complete it, and their total mileage was said to be equivalent to three trips to the Moon and back. The first of them arrived at Wembley at 3pm, where they were met by yet more celebrities. Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, told them they were 'the nation’s conscience' and 'one of the finest armies that has taken the field for many years'."

Sighcology: The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly

It's time to post another of the Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. It used to be called Changes, which must have saved a lot of typing.

You can watch Out of True for free on the British Film Institute Site, and The Snake Pit is not hard to find online.

The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly

Olivia de Havilland is sitting on a bench in the sun. We hear a man asking her questions, de Havilland’s thoughts and then her replies. The camera pans a little, but we still don’t see the man. Suddenly a young woman is in shot, talking to her. Then we hear the voice of an older woman calling them both in.

They’re in an institution, but what kind? Seeing some open balconies with bars on the upper storeys, de Havilland decides it’s a zoo. Once inside, she fears it’s a prison. “How did I get here?” A kindly man tells her not to be afraid. She is reassured and explains she is a novelist, in the prison for one day and now it’s time for her to go home. The man asks what her name is and she finds she does not know. She’s in a mental hospital.

This is the opening of the 1948 Hollywood film The Snake Pit, which tells the story of de Havilland’s recovery thanks to the gentle psychotherapy of Dr Kik – her problems turn out to originate in early childhood trauma. How much of his reputation did Freud owe to Hollywood? His work suggested stories whose endings were as surprising and as neat as that of any detective story.

Dr Kik, it seems worth recording, was played by the British Jewish actor Leo Genn. Before the war he combined a stage and screen career with work as a barrister. His last forensic employment was investigating and prosecuting the war crimes committed at Belsen.

The ward from which patients can go home is Ward 1, but de Havilland falls foul of a nurse jealous of the attention the doctor pays her and finds herself dispatched to the most distant back ward of all, the snake pit of the title. There she is forced into a cold bath and then into a straitjacket. 

******

De Havilland is rescued by her kindly psychiatrist and eventually taken home by a model American husband, but this was not the first time such scenes had been laid before the American public. In 1887, Nellie Bly, an ambitious young freelancer, doorstepped the editor of the New York World.

He turned her ideas down, challenging her to investigate instead the notorious New York mental asylum Blackwell’s Island. Bly accepted, feigning mental illness convincingly enough to fool the doctors and have herself admitted. What she saw there was revealed in a series of articles for the World and then collected in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.

The articles created a sensation – this is from a paraphrase in a rival newspaper:

Weak, shivering women were plunged into baths of ice cold water, one after another in the same water until the fluid was so thick that it had to be changed. … The bath over, the helpless ones were thrust into their garments wet and so they shivered through the long night. Nurses swore at the patients and beat them. Complaint to the physicians had no other effect than to increase the beatings in number and ferocity until the poor creatures promise to tell the physicians no more.

Bly spoke to as many women as she could and found many were immigrants who didn't understand English and had been sent there in error. Others were just poor and thought they were going to a poorhouse, not an insane asylum. 

Nurses, she reported, administered "so much morphine and chloral that the patients are made crazy," and “attendants seem to find amusement and pleasure in exciting the violent patients to do their worst". The asylum was also hopelessly overcrowded: 400 inmates had to sleep on the floor each night, and 300 had to stand while they ate.

Bly’s investigation brought about reforms at the asylum and then its closure seven years later.

******

For a few years after the war, the British censors were more relaxed than their American counterparts, yet The Snake Pit was shown over here in butchered form. Out went the straitjackets and scenes of what was decreed inappropriate humour – there had been a campaign to ban the film altogether.

In 1951 a British response to The Snake Pit appeared, made by the Crown Film Unit and sponsored by the Ministry of Health as a training aid and to raise public awareness. Out of True told the story of a woman who attempted suicide after a nervous breakdown and of her recovery in a mental hospital.

This is no Freudian detective puzzle: it’s clear from the outset that the woman’s problems are an overcrowded flat and the pressures of running the household. She is played by Jane Hylton, a graduate of the Rank charm school and a little too genteel to convince in the role. Her husband, puzzled but sympathetic, is better and his mother, who is living with them, is no caricature. She senses that her presence is one of her daughter-in-law’s difficulties and takes herself off to live with another relative.

The tone is hopeful, though it’s admitted that not every patient gets better and goes home, and the stigma of being a mental patient is acknowledged. I suppose we should not be surprised that Hylton is given ECT on entry to the hospital without warning, anaesthetic or any mention of consent. Her husband does question the treatment, saying it has affected her memory, but he’s told this is normal and she will soon recover.

Out of True can be watched on the British Film Institute website without charge.

******

Nellie Bly stopped acting when she arrived at the asylum, but the staff assumed her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity anyway. And if she had told them the truth, that she was there to research an article,  wouldn’t she have sounded just like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit? The newspaper gave her 10 days as a patient before it informed the authorities of the deceit.

Rosenhan would have understood.

The Joy of Six 1530

"The big red 'stop nudes' button is appealing because it’s a lot easier than investing in proper services to protect children and in the kind of education that will help them grow up in the world as it exists rather than the sterile bubble of Starmer's imagination. Bad actors will circumvent these measures while ordinary people's privacy is undermined, and health information and even art is censored. The design choices that have led to this environment are the same choices that the government courts when it tries to partner with these tech companies." Mic Wright looks at the media's uncritical coverage of government plans to prevent children viewing or sharing nude images online.

Claire Jones analyses the creeping misogyny of Reform's agenda: "To enshrine women’s demotion to second class citizens, Reform has pledged to drop the 2010 Equalities Act which provides legal recourse for maternity leave, sexual assault, domestic abuse and employment discrimination. Reform also plans to ditch the ECHR thus thwarting it’s use by women as another court of appeal. You can hear the sound of doors closing."

David Eddy asks who is protecting our drinking water as an energy company seeks permission to drill through the chalk aquifer beneath the Yorkshire Wolds in search of gas.

"You may heard that if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t fully developed yet. It's an adage supposing that individuals under 25 can’t think things through or make rational decisions, and so are less responsible than older folk. This logic has now formed the basis of official government advice, sentencing, and more. The only problem with this fact is... it’s not a fact. Never has been. No matter how many TikTokers insist otherwise." Dean Burnett takes aim at a scientific myth.

Oliver Bray has been to an exhibition at the Dickens Museum in London: "It reframes Dickens not only through the women he knew, but through the theatrical culture they collectively inhabited. Stepping outside, I felt his familiar voice linger, now joined by the sense that the women behind the scenes were finally stepping into the light – something the dramatist in Dickens might have appreciated." 

"On one level, this is a song about a man who, losing his mother, seeks to make his lover a surrogate maternal figure. On a larger level, it is about the need to find an escape, a haven, from the brutal realities of life. But it must be mentioned that this is a song about the power and necessity of movies... that was written for a movie." Another Paul on That's Why God Made the Movies, one of my favourite Paul Simon songs.

Searching for Normal by Sami Timimi

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity

Sami Timimi

Vintage, 2026, £12.99

Many years ago, through my then day job, I encountered the ideas of professionals who challenged the dominant account of serious mental health problems. It was wrong, they argued, to see these problems as caused by one or more of a collection of discrete mental illnesses. The term “schizophrenia”, for instance, now describes a quite different set of symptoms from those it did when it was coined in the 19th century, and despite all the advances made in neuroimaging, physical signs that would allow schizophrenia to be securely diagnosed remain as elusive as ever. And homosexuality ceased to be a mental disorder in the US in 1973, not because of any scientific discovery, but because of a vote among psychiatrists. Of those eligible to take part, 21 per cent said it was a disorder, 32 per cent said it wasn’t and 47 per cent failed to return their ballot paper.

Because the charge is often made, it’s worth emphasising that critical professionals don’t seek to minimise the suffering of people diagnosed with mental illness. What is true is that they are more likely to look for the causes in people’s life experiences, such as abuse, discrimination and poverty. They find the most useful question to ask a new client is not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What’s happened to you?” They also recognise that the treatments often prescribed, from psychoactive medication to electroconvulsive therapy, are not without distressing side-effects.

These critical mental health professionals are a heterogeneous group, but it’s fair to number the psychiatrist Sami Timimi among them. He writes well about what he calls the “mental health industrial complex (MHIC)” – which is in part what we used to call Big Pharma – and how it affects society:

Problems that are socio-political can easily be converted into problems that are psychological. The devastating consequences of discriminations, together with the persistent and pervasive inequities in society, are turned into mental disorders that need mental health care rather than political action. The diminishing boundaries for normal also mean that, over recent decades, the MHIC has continued to benefit from billions in revenue through individualising and psychologising mental suffering.

Where Searching for Normal will be controversial for many is that Timimi includes conditions like ADHD and mild autism in this analysis. Again, he is not denying people’s problems: one of the best things in the book are his case studies of young patients. (They are composites to protect individual clients’ confidentiality) They bring home that each person’s difficulties and suffering are different and that giving a patient one, two or half a dozen diagnoses – and some do receive that many – tells you little about them or what is likely to help them. 

Yet it is undeniable that both ADHD and mild autism are fluid concepts. ADHD has gone from a condition affecting small boys, whose symptoms sounded very like a list of those things about children that most irritate adults, to one found in both sexes and in adults as well as children. And, in online discourse though not psychiatric manuals, from one characterised by inattention to one that can equally well be characterised by paying too much attention. Who, we need to ask, is to say what too much attention is? The neurodiversity movement promised more acceptance of differing personalities, but it too often seeks a medical diagnosis for anyone who differs from an ever-narrowing and ever more stereotypical idea of what is “neurotypical”.

I was pleased to see that in looking at alternative frameworks for helping people, Timimi commends the Power Meaning Threat Network, which was published in 2018 by a group of clinical psychologists and service-user campaigners. He describes it as providing “a way of helping people to create more hopeful stories about their lives and the difficulties they have faced or are still facing, instead of seeing themselves as blameworthy. Weak, deficient or ‘mentally ill’.” It has its roots, to return to my old day job, in a project I once helped to initiate.

Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and table legs

Long ago, in its February 2004 issue to be precise, I wrote an occasional humorous column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange. As I still come across people who are quite convinced that the Victorians thought table legs indecent, I am repeating it here.

I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Victorians, modesty and table legs

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.” 

How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’

So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the strait-laced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go that the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

The Joy of Six 1513

"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.

A topical video: What constitutes "reasonable force"

Another video from barrister-at-law Alan Robertshaw. One interesting point he makes is that the common courtroom assumption that a statement given immediately after an event provides the best evidence is mistaken.

I also like his favourite line: "cross-examination does not mean examining someone crossly". And there's a useful tip on how to dress if you're planning a robbery.

For the JCPCP: Norma Varden, the Norman Yoke, Being Normal and Norman Bowler

I've just sent another of my columns off to the The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, so it's time to publish an earlier one here again. The theme for this issue was "Norma, Norman or Normal".

Goodbye Norma Jean. This obviously had to begin with someone called Norma, but Marilyn Monroe didn’t make the cut. Instead, I’ve gone for the English-born piano prodigy turned Hollywood actress Norma Varden, who appeared in both Casablanca and The Sound of Music.

In Casablanca she’s the wife of the Englishman who has his wallet stolen right at the start of the film. In The Sound of Music she’s the housekeeper who tells Julie Andrews, who has just found a frog in her bed, “You're lucky. With Fraulein Helga, it was a snake.”

There was talk of Varden playing the Mother Superior, but Hollywood elbows get very sharp when a top nun role is up for grabs.

******

Our next caller is Gerrard Winstanley. Gerrard, what’s on your mind this evening?

O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.

Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers or True Levellers during the Civil War and Commonwealth. His words here are a quotation from The True Levellers Standard Advanced, published in 1649.

The idea that the people of England laboured under the Norman Yoke – ruled by the descendants of William I and his generals – had a shadowy existence through the Middle Ages and came into the light when central authority broke down during the Civil War.

And that yoke is still round our necks today. In 2011, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, published research showing that people with Norman surnames – Mandeville, Percy, Darcy – live three years longer than the rest of us and leave significantly larger estates.

Studying the probate records of those with "rich" and "poor" names for every decade since the 1850s, he found the extreme differences in accumulated wealth had narrowed over time. Yet his conclusion was still that:

Over the last 150 years, the rate of social mobility revealed by surnames is slower than most social scientists have estimated – and is possibly slower than in the middle ages.

Or to put it another way, the wealthy hold us as much in bondage as "the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War".

******

I’ve never been that keen on being normal, so I was heartened by the rise of the neurodiversity movement and its insight that conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia weren’t disorders to be fixed, but part of the rich spectrum of human cognitive diversity.

But that movement worries me now, both because it accepts the coherence of such diagnoses, even welcomes them as providing an identity, and because it takes it as axiomatic that cognitive differences are a reflection of differences in people’s brains.

When I began to consider these questions, I was sceptical about the concept of ADHD. Weren’t the disorder’s supposed symptoms just a list of the things about children that most irritate teachers? Don’t pharmaceutical companies famously “sell the disease, not the drug”? Wasn’t Ritalin marketed as a treatment for depression and fatigue – particularly “Tired Housewife Syndrome” – before ADHD was invented? I once wrote an article for OpenMind along just these lines.

This view is deeply out of fashion now, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong. When I see a headline like “Third of UK parents have sought special needs assessment for their child, survey finds,” it still seems to me that we should look at the social and educational pressures on parents and children rather than unthinkingly locate the problem inside the child’s brain.

Not only has the concept of ADHD won near-universal professional acceptance, it has escaped into the wild, evolved and bred with autism to sire AuDHD. This diagnosis may not have received its clinical imprimatur, but it’s everywhere online.

You may see its arrival as an important new insight into the causes of cognitive differences, or you may reflect that when the symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism are as loosely drawn as they are, at least online, there’s bound to be some overlap between the two clusters.

These days I don’t get to see the professional literature so often, so the ADHD discourse I come across is on social media or in conversations overheard in coffee shops. What strikes me about it is the confidence with which people refer to “the ADHD brain” or even “the ADHD nervous system”. That confidence, I believe, runs far ahead of the scientific consensus on how far the condition can be identified by neuroimaging or any other technology.

People obviously derive comfort, meaning and membership of a community from their diagnoses, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee their validity. I don’t have a conclusion to offer here, but I’ll remain an interested, if worried, observer of developments.

******

I can remember the Sixties and lying in bed at eight o’clock, hearing the theme music of the police drama Softly Softly and wishing I could stay up to watch it.

When I did get to see it, I adopted Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, as my hero. Clive James once suggested he did little but open and close doors:

In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in.

But I liked him. And years later he reappeared as Frank Tate, the keystone of the relaunched soap opera Emmerdale, so he must have been able to act. 

What I didn’t know then was that, in the Fifties, Bowler had been a member of the Soho set alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.

So never despise a Norman – unless it’s Norman Wisdom, of course.

The Joy of Six 1505

Bee Boileau, Lucas Conwell ans Peter Levell find that Help to Buy schemes don't help the people who most need it: "The affordability gains from the equity loan schemes were concentrated among higher-income individuals. Since these individuals would normally be expected to be able to save for a minimum deposit quite quickly even without Help to Buy, it is likely that these schemes accelerated their first home purchase by a few years rather than making the difference between becoming a homeowner or not in the longer term."

"Rebekah Pierre, deputy director of the charity Article 39, said ... posters advertising payments of 'up to £932 per week per child' 'stopped me in my tracks' when she encountered them in a local shopping centre." Joanne Parkes on criticism of a fostering recruitment campaign by Croydon Council, arguing that its messaging risks reducing children in care to a "price tag".

Emma John reports that some researchers say that the common framing of ADHD as a characteristic for success can be unhelpful for those who are struggling.

James Cracknell says that AI is being used to undermine real local journalism: "North London News features stories about Enfield and Barnet and other boroughs that are put together by AI bots using existing stories published on other websites, including our own. This is bad enough – but what's worse is that they are also adding fake quotes, fake people (including fake councillors), fake organisations and fake facts into these stories as well. Whatever AI system they are using, it is massively flawed."

"Several startling passages of dialogue have sent me scrolling through the week’s listings to unveil an author. Katie Hims can nail a character through their choice of confectionery: of course, the trad Jim Lloyd would go for wine gums. Nick Warburton scripted a bonkers visit by a character obsessed with train timetables and pebbles, then cleverly had one of the most stolid residents complain that the incomer was a bore." Susannah Clapp praises The Archers scriptwriters.

"In Britain hauntings occur in ancient manor houses, old inns, and Gothic asylums – places whose very age makes them groan and creak, where shadows sit deep, and which are scarred by the lingering imprint of lives lived and lost. And yet arguably the most famous British ghost story of the 20th century took place somewhere quite different: in a humble council house, only half a century old, in Enfield, north London." Ray Newman considers the haunting of social housing.

GUEST POST To realise the health benefits of nature we must first admit we are part of it

Stuart Whomsley reminds us that, though we evolved as a species surrounded by the blue and green stuff, we also have the power to destroy it.

Let me start by stating what should be obvious, but it is something that can be lost in the way the discourse on this topic is constructed, humans are part of nature. We are not an entity separate from the rest of nature. 

We need to break the demarcation of humans as separate from nature, humans vs nature. This includes where the aims are positive, such as nature as a treatment that can be applied to humanity or to a human to restore wellbeing. It is by addressing humanity as being part of nature we get the deepest appreciation of why it is beneficial.

The dichotomy of humanity as separate from nature has a deep cultural heritage. The Abrahamic tradition had God create man, and give him, and maybe her, the rest of nature to rule over and use. It was separate. 

The theme was further developed in the Enlightenment, with God perhaps taken out of the equation. Nature was now a resource, often represented as feminine Mother Nature, for man to plunder and use her resources at his pleasure. 

this  masculine approach has led to the destruction of the rain forests and the plundering of the earth for fossil fuels and now rare metals.  I find myself wondering what is it about the burning of marine microorganisms, whose remains have been heated and compressed for millions of years, that seems to make some men feel so potent – call it "petro-masculinity". 

When we compare the effects on health and wellbeing of being in man-made environments and of being in nature, those man-made environments are made by humans who are part of nature. However, man-made environments have tended to have forms that do not fit with the rest of creation in the natural world. 

There is an interesting question: why have human environments have been developed in ways that go against the structures elsewhere in nature? Anthropogenic environments have been created to meet short-term needs rather than following the patterns of slower ecological adaptation to a place. 

When people talk about being in nature they are thinking about the green and blue stuff which has different properties to what humans have tended to create.

So let's consider the health benefits, both for physical and mental health. from being in nature of the blue and green kind. Put simply, there is good evidence for this, which is hardly surprising given that we are part of nature. There is a natural fit between human beings and certain environments.

In our species history we have evolved to be surrounded by the green and blue stuff, we have evolved to be surrounded by the soft and curvy, under the light of the sun. We have evolved to cease activity when the sun has move around the other side of the globe. We have evolved in these environments to function best in these conditions.  

So it is predictable that mental and physical health face challenges when people are living and working in boxes, away from the green and blue, with artificial lights taking them into continuing activity beyond natural daylight.

The key messages from research into the health benefits of being in nature are predictable and reassuring. The benefits can be seen through a biopsychosocial and spiritual framework: cortisol levels go down, anxiety reduces, self-esteem increases, cognitive abilities go up, mood is improved, a sense of connection to something greater than the self and awe experiences occur.

Little and often is a key message, which for me was both predictable, but also a bit of a surprise.  This makes it something that is more possible for more people.  You do not have to be planning a weekend in the Lake District.

However, to get the benefits you must give yourself to the experience. It is no good standing before a view of herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain if you are busy engaging with your mobile phone. 

In contrast, if you fully engage with experiencing being part of nature, you can gain the benefits through a dandelion growing through the cracks in the pavement – though it probably comes easier if you are in a verdant park and engaging with nature there than if you are on your knees looking at cracks in pavements. But verdant parks are closer to some people than others.

Research suggests there are social inequities in being able to access green and blue spaces. Those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have further to go to get to a recognised green space than their financially and socially more advantaged fellow citizens. 

A case could be made that one layer in the damage to mental and physical health came at a population level when people were forced to move from the countryside to cities for work. The effects of that could be transgenerational and interacting with other factors across the years. 

That is not to say living and working in the countryside is free from stress or health risks, but research continues to demonstrate that mental health problems occur more frequently in cities than in rural areas.

There needs to be equity and a democratic approach in citizen participation in nature. Such an approach will not be accepted by all. It will be seen as wokery and left wing by the fossil fuel, anti-Net Zero advocates. However, the science and most of the population cross culturally around the world would be in line with it. 

People have more hope and are more resilient if they can feel connected to the thing that they are already connected to, nature.  But need to feel it in a real and engaged way. That is a message people can connect to.

It is not only necessary for the health and wellbeing of humans, but also for the vast bulk of nature that is not human. As a species we have the capacity to destroy most, if not all, of the other species on the planet, something no other species can do. A specific virus might wipe out all humans, but it would not touch most of the other species, and a virus that would destroy humans would not harm plants at all. So, humans have that special, unpleasant privilege. 

Yet they are still part of nature. A part of nature of high risk to the rest.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Bluesky.

The Joy of Six 1484

"It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning. These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ." John Pavlovitz takes us inside a scary place – the Republican-Evangelical mind.

Helen Amass talks to Uta Frith about her current understanding of autism. Professor Frith says: "People still hang on to the idea that there is something that unites all the people who are diagnosed as autistic. I don’t believe that any more."

Richard Toye warns against simplistic invocation of Winston Churchill's name as a way of supporting military action: "Churchill once observed that war, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it. That warning may be as relevant as any of his more famous phrases."

A leading judge has as issued new guidance saying unregulated psychologists should not be called to give expert evidence in family courts, reports Hannah Summers.

"Both – and they were truly intertwined for decades – made their mark at Oxford University: Potter, the controversial working-class voice who shocked viewers on BBC Television’s Does Class Matter? (1958); Trodd, the provocative editor of university mag Isis who got removed from his post in favour of the milder-mannered David Dimbleby in 1959." Ian Greaves celebrates the career of Kenith Trodd, the television producer who worked closely with Dennis Potter.

Libby Brooks finds the children of Lanark enjoying Whuppity Scoorie.

The Joy of Six 1480

"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson.

"'At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net Zero.

Gemma Motion makes the case for raising England's age of criminal responsibility: "Internationally, the UK’s position is becoming isolated. Article 40(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility. While no specific age is prescribed, 14 is the most common minimum across Europe. Several other countries set it higher still. Even our devolved neighbour Scotland, which historically had a lower threshold at eight years of age, has now raised it to 12."

Tourettes Hero discusses the fallout from the BAFTA awards ceremony.

"The central strategic question is not whether non-host counties will survive. They will. The question is whether they will retain any meaningful competitive agency within the professional game. On the evidence available, the answer is no. Not under the current framework." Gary Mason and Simon Aldis argue that the future is bleak for most of cricket's first-class counties.

Discontinued Notes has been to Oxford to see the exhibition at the Bodleian about John Le Carré.