Violet Bonham Carter and Mary Stocks remember the struggle for women's suffrage

I thought I had finished blogging for today, but this video is too good not to share with you tonight.

It's a BBC2 discussion from 1968 with Lady Asquith (better known as Violet Bonham Carter) and Lady Stocks. A young Joan Bakewell is in the chair.

They are talking about a television film about how women got the vote, and both take the view that it exaggerated the importance of the militant tactics of the Suffragettes at the expense of the role played by the wider Suffrage movement. 

And Lady Asquith remembers defending her father, the Liberal prime minister, from attack by Suffragettes.

Lady Stocks was the cousin of Tim Brinton, a Conservative MP in the Thatcher era and the father of Sal Brinton, the former president of the Liberal Democrats.

I've also discovered that Lady Stocks's husband, a little-remembered philosopher called John Leofric Stocks, was the son of John Edward Stocks, who was vicar of Market Harborough from 1871 to 1884 and then of the fascinating St Saviour's in Leicester.

The Joy of Six 1579

Dawn Butler lays bare the abuse that a Black female MP faces: "Followers of my social media know how bad it can be. I have a regular “block of the month” feature to raise awareness of the disgusting racist abuse sent to me every day – the N-word, “monkey” and “ape” are common insults. The deluge of abuse has a detrimental impact on my mental health, and on those around me."

"There is no reindustrialisation beyond heavily Government-directed industries such as defence and even pharmaceuticals without reversing Brexit. That will not be sufficient, but it is absolutely necessary. And yet, there is literally no mention of Brexit in the core arguments of Reindustrialising Britain." Anthony Painter reads a new collection of essays from Policy Exchange.

Milli Hill on David Walliams and his publisher: "It wasn’t until CEO Charlie Redmayne left Harper Collins in October 2025 and was replaced by a woman, Kate Elton, that decisive action was taken."

"Keynes was a liberal for our age: morally serious, hopeful for a better future, and yet reconciled to the expertly-executed compromises that must be struck to preserve a liberal order that is far more fragile than some would like to believe." Guillaume A.W. Attia says you should read John Maynard Keynes.

"It’s quite lonely and I hate this house because it’s so cold. I just wish I could speed up the process but I can’t. Some days I’m right on to it, and then other days I just can’t, because it’s very emotional – and I’m not really an emotional person." Stephanie Woods interviews four women about the ordeal of clearing a dead parent's house.

Francis Young looks at the importance of folklore to Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy.

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"In the days that followed RNLI crew members found pictures of themselves strewn across social media. Online posts described the search and rescue workers as 'traitors', falsely alleging that they had housed asylum seekers and were moving them to secret locations. Some posts included volunteer’s addresses and phone numbers, putting them and their families at heightened risk." Nicola Kelly says the RNLI are heroes, not traitors.

Sian Norris brings us a shocking story: "Domestic abuse victims in England and Wales are facing arrest when calling the emergency services for help, according to new data published by Women in Prison. The charity asked more than 500 women in the criminal justice system about their experiences of domestic abuse, with nearly a third saying they were arrested when the police or emergency services were called to a domestic incident, even when they were the victim of abuse."

Louise Balint-Kurti reports on the return of beavers to the Midlands and the environmental benefits they are already bringing.

"By not accepting that the Civil War was about slavery, then not only could the romantic underdog myth of the lost cause be successfully promulgated but also the Jim Crow laws could come into practice with little or no intervention for decades, and more recently the defence and promotion of Confederate statues and street names could continue." John Bleasdale maps the way Hollywood made the South look like a noble lost cause.

"These buildings range from palaces and religious buildings to two-storeyed houses and simple dwellings. They give the beholder some idea of what the 11th-century built environment looked like on either side of the Channel, even though the representations are formulaic, general impressions." Elizabeth den Hartog on what the Bayeux tapestry tells us about medieval buildings.

David Southwell, the creator of Hookland, answers 10 questions about his work. (David once gave my name to an inhabitant of the county who tried to assassinate Dr Beeching.)

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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.

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Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."

Abandoning the triple lock on pensions  is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.

Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.

"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.

"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today. 

Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."

New public square in Telford honours women who worked in Shropshire's coalfields

Betty Harris Square Telford. Photo: Telford Council

A new square has been named in honour of women who worked in Shropshire coalfields, reports BBC News:

The area in Telford has become Betty Harris Square, after her experiences "as a 'pit girl' became one of the most powerful accounts of women's working lives during Britain's industrial past", the council said.

It added while she was not from Telford, her story represented thousands, many whose names were unknown, who worked in east Shropshire coalfields.

More than 1,000 people voted for the name after residents were invited to vote from a shortlist of influential women connected to the area's history.

This gives me the excuse to quote from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles Masterman:

The Coal Mines Act went through with little trouble except for a struggle to keep pit-brow lasses their right to work. Masterman had made enquiries into the question when he had been to Lancashire ... and had also received a deputation of the lasses themselves, sturdy, strapping girls obviously in far better health than the majority of factory or shop girls; and was determined they should not go. 

He laid down the principle: that women should not be forbidden any type of work unless it was proved to be (1) unhealthy, (2) in a situation dangerous to morals, (3) of a degrading and degraded character, and that a Parliament in which women were not represented should be chary of excluding them from any work they wished to do.

I knew I had used that quote on here before and, I thought, quite recently. When I searched for it, it turns out to be eight years ago. Who knows where the time goes?

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Who are the goons in balaclavas who turned up in Dover and Portsmouth? Hope Not Hate explains: "In 2016, he [Danny Tommo] pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to two years in prison after taking part in an armed attempt to abduct a man during a drugs-related dispute."

Rosemary Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should fight the Holborn and St Pancras by-election hard and answers her critics in the comments.

Cathy Young pays tribute to Gloria Steinem: "The vision Steinem shared in 1971 of a humanist and egalitarian future may have been simplistic in its idealism. But in 2026, it’s a far more humane vision, and better for it, than what her right-wing detractors have to offer."

"During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was 'not a Scotchman' and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan's racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military." Martin Spychal has researched the career of Peter McLagan, whom he calls "Scotland’s first Black MP".

"She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea: Dolly seemed to consciously 'do' Dolly. A songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, advocate, mogul and more, she was always pivoting between different aspects of herself, and twirling those impressive embellished skirts and dresses all the while." Niela Orr celebrates the life and music of Dolly Parton.

The Secret Cricket Coach asks where the hell Rob Key is: "For years he was paid to tell us what was right and wrong with English cricket. Now he is responsible for much of it, but recently we haven’t heard much from him. England have had a difficult period, questions are being asked about behaviour, standards and leadership, and it is Joe Root who seems to be answering them. I find that quite strange."

After Dark podcast: Dr Louise Brangan on the Magdalene laundries

 

This edition of the After Dark podcast impressed me because it showed that what we English think we know about Ireland's Magdalene laundries is wrong. The guest expert Dr Louise Brangan of the London School of Economics emphasises that their inmates were not generally young women who'd had a baby outside marriage. Many had been admitted at a younger age than that for trivial reasons.

It also bears out much of what James Hawes said in his The Shortest History of Ireland. As I wrote in my review of this book:

Hawes shows that the Catholic dominance of Irish society was a post-independence creation and did not fully establish itself until 1937. This dominance, with its satanic trio of institutions – industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries – was the work of Éamon de Valera, the politician who dominated the first 50 years of the independent Ireland, and Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin.

Louise Brangan says that in the 1920s the newly independent Republic of Ireland had a young population and there was freedom in the air. It didn't stay there for long.

This is a painful subject but it's a good podcast and gives an important insight into Irish history. 

A final point... After Dark is one of the podcasts that appears on BBC Sounds. But if you look on its index page there, you will not find this edition. Under 27 August 2026, the day it was posted, you will find instead Danny Robbins on "History's greatest ghosts".

I wonder if that is political or religious censorship?

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"Every large fire has two causes, the spark that lights it and the conditions that let it become so severe. Naming the fire, though, can hide this, as does reporting. A fire is named in hours, blamed in days, and attributed a true cause in weeks." Doug Specht argues that we should reterg 'wildfire' in favour of 'landscape fire', stating the spark where it is known and explaining the conditions that allowed it to spread.

"Judge Paul McCloskey scanned a group of immigrant children, none of whom had lawyers present, in his windowless suburban Virginia courtroom this past Thursday. Where’s the 7-year-old?' he asked." Eric Bazail-Eimil observes immigration proceedings in Trump's America.

Anilya Krishnan on concerns about the 'wilderness therapy' programmes, which often set back families thousands of dollars and form part of the US's lucrative 'troubled teen' industry.

Christian Wolmar says cycling is a feminist issue.

"What really troubled them was that putting the story of William into the context of a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents was creating a parallel between William as an innocent boy who was killed allegedly by the Jews, with the story of the boys under two years old in Bethlehem being killed by a Jewish king, Herod." Pat Ashworth on Norwich Cathedral's approach to its troubling unofficial local saint.

Alison Kerr celebrates Alastair Sim: "His rich, commanding voice and heavy-lidded, dark-shadowed eyes lent him an air of menace upon which he capitalised to memorable effect in Scrooge and as various other characters of dubious morals. Sim appeared to play these parts – the lecherous lodger (with dyed black hair combed over to one side) in London Belongs to Me, the initially frightening author in Hue and Cry, and the mysterious title character in An Inspector Calls – with relish and gusto."

How Bodhana Sivanandan became British women's chess champion at the age of 11

Not only does Britain have a 17-year-old chess champion, it also has an 11-year-old women's champion.

Yesterday Bodhana Sivanandan won a play-off with 14-year-old Trisha Kanyamarala to claim this crown. The women's title goes to the highest placed woman in the British championship, which is open to all. The two had tied, so a play-off was needed to separate them.

You can see Bohdana win the tense decisive second game in the video above. The first had ended in a draw.

Bodhana is a positional player, with a wonderful instinct for where each piece belongs. Shreyas Royal, who won the British championship, played her in the tournament and won by forcing her into a sharp position that didn't suit her so well. 

But she is improving rapidly and people are are already forecasting that she will win the British championship one day and also become the strongest women player in the world.

Bodhana Sivanandan breaks another world age record in chess

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England's chess prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan broke another world age record last week, reports Leonard Barden in the Guardian. At a tournament held in Aix-en-Provence, she achieved her first international master norm at the age of 11 years and four months. 

This made her the youngest female player to achieve this feat, beating the record of Judit Polgár, who later became the highest-rated female player in history. She didn't manage it until the age of 11 years and 9 months.

International master is the title one below grandmaster in chess. To achieve it a player must achieve three such norms, which are acquired by playing at the required strength in a tournament, and reach a high enough rating on the international list.

Bodhana is also two-thirds of the way towards becoming a woman grandmaster. If she achieves her third  norm for this in the next year, she will beat the record for the youngest holder of the title.

The separate title of woman grandmaster was introduced to give the stronger women players something to strive for. Whether it's down to nature or nurture, few of them are able to qualify for the grandmaster title the best male players hold.

But Judit Polgár became a grandmaster, and it's significant that her father (something of a chess Richard Williams) never allowed her or her sisters to play in women's tournaments but always had them competing with the men in open tournaments.

The appearance of a talent like Bodhana, and the large increase in the number of girls taking up the game, gives you hope that these separate titles will one day disappear.

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"The idea that England has always been governed from a single political centre is surprisingly recent. Westminster may now appear almost inseparable from the state, but for much of English history, government was far more mobile." Stephanie Brown says Andy Burnham’s No 10 North has a precedent in medieval York.

Nafeez Ahmed examines the links between George Cottrell’s Reform UK network in Montenegro and sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

"When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children’s services is something more basic: whether families have enough money to live on." Rick Hood explains the findings of his research.

Jennifer Rubin Grandis confronts the systemic bias in academic publishing: "I’ve been studying sexism in academic medicine since 2019, and I’ve learned from countless interviewees that my experience as a woman in medicine is common. Women are rarely mentored well—in fact, when they ask for advice from senior faculty, they’re often discouraged from submitting their papers to high-impact journals, despite making just as many scientific discoveries as men."

Boak & Bailey recommend pub crawling as a way of practising psychogeography.

"Few science fiction relationships stick in my mind better than the love/hate between Dr. Zachary Smith and Robot in the original 1960s version of Lost in Space." J.G. Follansbee on one of television SF's great double acts.

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Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.

"The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted." Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia.

 Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."

In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.

"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.

Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."

Another myth exploded: Queen Victoria and the lesbians

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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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Aveek Bhattacharya argues that Andy Burnham is Labour's Boris Johnson: "The two men share a tendency to be led by instinct over doctrine, a talent for building coalitions, and a rare capacity to resonate emotionally with an audience. They also share a common vulnerability: a reluctance to bring their own side bad news. Both are men for the big picture rather than nitty-gritty details, happiest channeling grievance and hope into a broad political story."

A disproportionate number of children and young people growing up in care in Scotland are dying prematurely, Yet, despite Scottish government policy, almost two-thirds of such deaths over the last five years have not been reviewed, reports Karin Goodwin.

"If I can get 15 minutes with parents and policymakers, the argument becomes much more nuanced. Parents actually breathe a sigh of relief. They can make all the decisions they want to about how tech-free or tech-full they want to be, based on their values and what they want for their family – but they don’t have to make it with this threat that it's going to lead to horrible outcomes for their children." Amelia Gentleman interviews the psychologist Candice Odgers, who is a sceptic on social media bans for teenagers.

Alan Lester looks at the politics behind arguments about the teaching of the history of the British Empire in schools. 

Ferdinand Mount writes about M.R. James, ghosts and sex.

"As the narrator lies on the doctor’s couch, revealing her thoughts in a candid, unguarded manner, a harrowing picture begins to emerge. We learn how every aspect of her life has been dictated by men, from her upbringing to her choices of husbands and the nature of their marriages to the control of her physical and mental health." JacquiWine says Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Easter is the best novel she has read this year.

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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."

The rigged system Freda Jackson overcame to become an actress in the 1930s

I wrote about the actress Freda Jackson's background on Central Bylines:

Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.

Yesterday's purchase Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92 tells us what happened after that successful audition:

Miss Jackson's status for her first five months in Northampton was that of pupil, which meant that she received no salary. She had originally applied to Herbert Prentice, by then at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, since the pupil system did not operate there, he advised her to try Northampton. The pupil arrangement was confined to actresses, young actors being in such short supply that they could command a salary from the outset.

The dedication of the pupil actress extended not only to support herself without salary, but also to providing an adequate personal wardrobe for modern plays, a much more onerous requirement than for her male colleagues.

Were young male actors really in such short supply, or was it simple sexism that saw them paid from the outset when young actresses weren't.

Whatever the reason, this arrangement made it next to impossible for a young working-class woman to embark on a theatrical career. It explains why maids in Thirties films, of which there were many, were usually played by upper-class girls with unconvincing cockney accents.

We are seeing a return to such an arrangement in Britain today: every well-endowed private school has its own theatre, but the public facilities open to youngsters from poorer homes are under increasing financial pressure.It's no wonder we see the same limited group of privately educated actors snaffling the star roles in British films. And narrowing the pipeline of talent entering the acting profession can only result in a reduction in quality.

Anyway, you can see Freda Jackson above as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V.

The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.

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"Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured." This seems a good day to air again this Neal Lawson theory.

Prem Sikka on the curse of the finance industry: "Private equity takes over existing businesses with finance from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals seeking higher returns. It acquires control but injects little share capital. Takeover targets are loaded with the secured debt, often routed through opaque offshore entities, and are expected to pay it off."

Matt Gallagher says the Online Safety Act is forcing us to hand over personal data to unregulated overseas corporations with questionable privacy records.

"Behind every great director ... is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman." Bethany Elliott investigates a familiar dynamic in male-dominated Hollywood.

Carrie Marshall goes to see the B52s.

"She grows smaller. Was she approximately human-sized in her wearing-a-pinny-and-doing-the-laundry phase, but then hedgehog-sized at the end? In the final image, she is a completely naturalistic hedgehog4. She looks like a little brown aubergine. So it's possible that at the end of his story – shudder – Samuel Whiskers has grown bigger." Sam Leith is worried: how big are Beatrix Potter's animals?

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"When news of the arrests of the three Ukrainians broke, a rumour soon began to spread online that the alleged perpetrators were, in fact, Ukrainian male sex workers employed by Starmer and that the arson attack was revenge for unpaid bills. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most influential online figures involved in spreading this 'Rent Boys' conspiracy theory was Stephen Lennon." Joe Mulhall and Nick Lowles argue that Tommy Robinson is Putin's useful idiot.

Theo Rodwell fears the Liberal Democrats are being held hostage by Conservatives who have lent them their votes.

"The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, announced that 'one thousand New Yorkers won our lottery for affordable tickets to the World Cup ... the beautiful game belongs to everyone.' Having to run an affordable lottery suggests that maybe it doesn't." Natasha Chahal on FIFA and Trump's world cup.

Emma Peplow looks back to the Christchurch by-election of 1993.

Richard Williams reads a new biography of Brian Epstein: "A man who loved the theatre and classical music, he understood their adventurous creative instincts. When they made that first film, it was directed by the innovative Dick Lester rather than a Wardour Street hack. When the sleeve art of their second album was being prepared, he guided them towards Robert Freeman, whose photos of John Coltrane he had admired and who listened to the group when they showed him Astrid Kirchherr's black and white chiaroscuro Hamburg photographs as a potential template."

"Every day, in New York alone, millions pass by her. On Columbia University’s campus, at the Frick Collection, in Central Park, near City Hall, and at the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. ... Yet the woman behind the face lived a life marked by exploitation, disappointment, and profound tragedy. Her death in 1996, at the age of 104, attracted almost no attention at all, as if history forgot all that she had been and given. The statues remain, but she was buried in an unmarked grave in northern New York state." Josie Cox tells the sad story of Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel.

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James Ball argues that Labour's social media ban for teenagers is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces: "The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce."

"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.

Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.

"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.

"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.

Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."