Jago Hazzard sets out the history of Golders Green station, and tells us about the history of the London Underground and of London suburbia in the process.
You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not subscribe to his YouTube channel?
Virginia Heffernan investigates Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon, Edge. She finds that it infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science.
"'Free School Meals' and 'Free School Clothing' were an absolute lifeline for us ... That support meant I could walk through the school gates looking like everyone else, focusing on my education rather than the clothes on my back. It taught me that while education is a right, the cost of accessing it can be a barrier we must actively dismantle." Shaffaq Mohammed on the importance of the Lib Dem amendment, passed by the Lords, that will put a price cap on school uniforms.
Lauren Leek crunches the numbers to see why so many pubs have closed: "So here’s the political economy of pub closures. It is not: people stopped going. It is: pubs became collateral in leveraged buyouts, debt costs were passed down as higher rents and lower investment, and the pubs that couldn’t sustain the extraction closed, while the ones that could were reshaped into higher-margin branded concepts serving a wealthier clientele."
Did climate change lead to greater persecution of witches? York Historian weighs the evidence.
"Whenever a performer had a Muppet on their hand, they never broke character. So all the time in between takes, Gonzo would still be Gonzo and I was still talking to Gonzo, not Dave Goelz, who is the performer of Gonzo. I believed that Gonzo and Rizzo were my friends, and we were on an adventure together. Rizzo in particular, Steve Whitmire, was so funny. We would just play all day long." Kevin Bishop shares his memories of playing Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island with Brian VanHooker.
These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.
The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.
It also quotes Ed Davey
"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too.
"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."
This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:
The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.
A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:
Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.
And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:
A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".
So I watched Simon and Laura, and found that, despite the presence of Ian Carmichael, who I always struggle with, it justifies the enthusiasm of that British Film Institute video I posted the other day.
But there is one scene that brought unexpected pleasure – click play above to watch it.
Peter Finch (Simon) has left his wife and is on his way back to Leicester. His agent (played by Hubert Gregg) catches up with him at St Pancras with news of the offer for the couple to star in the new BBC series.
It really is St Pancras, right down to the lovely maroon British Railways Midland Region enamel signs.
A train to Bradford is announced, and one of the stations it calls at is Trent. (You can also hear Trent in a St Pancras announcement in the Kenneth More film The Comedy Man.)
Better still, the porter who takes Finch's luggage on to and then off the platform is Charles Hawtrey – this may well be the first time he has worked for the railways since A Canterbury Tale.
And the refreshment counter is in the charge of Joan Hickson. Enjoy.
After delivering the lectures, he went to stay with his brother, the novelist Henry James, in Rye. Seamus Perry, in the London Review of Books, tells what he got up to there:
He was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely "gurgled and giggled", he apparently came across as "lovable".
Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a "tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes"; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton's exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called "modern intellectualism".
The Guardian introduces us to Tyler Ballgame – this is the title track from his first album, which was released last month:
"Not long after his first trip to London, a video of him performing live at a Los Angeles bar called the Fable began circulating online. By the time he came back to the UK to perform at Brighton industry showcase the Great Escape, he had signed to Rough Trade. Critical hosannas began raining down on Ballgame: he has variously been compared to Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley."
And there's more:
He also turned out to be catnip for what’s left of the music press, an interviewee with a penchant for the hippy-friendly philosophy of Alan Watts and an intriguing backstory. A Berklee College of Music dropout who spent years sequestered in his parents’ basement, struggling with depression and a gargantuan appetite for marijuana, he underwent a “spiritual awakening” thanks to the work of German self-help guru Eckhart Tolle – also beloved of Kendrick Lamar – and the intervention of a dietician and counsellor called Courtney Huard, who was subsequently murdered by her husband.
Who are all these people?
Moreover, he announced, Tyler Ballgame wasn’t just a stage name, it was a persona the former Tyler Perry had invented, drawing on his background in drama: playing the part of an “idealised frontman from the 60s and 70s” gave him “the licence to show more” of himself.
As to his music, Ballgame has been compared to a lot of other singers – Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley. You can hear some of those influences here.
He's hardly the first artist to be derivative, but would it be a huge surprise if Ballgame turned out to have been generated by AI?
"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.
"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.
Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."
"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.
Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.
Between 1962, when he first appeared as Charlie Barlow in Z-Cars, and 1976, when he played the character for the last time in Second Verdict, Britain's most famous television policeman was Stratford Johns.
That baton was then taken on by John Thaw, who had begun playing Jack Regan in The Sweeney in 1975. He continued in that role until 1978 and then played Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000. (I don't remember their being any clear holder of the crown during that interregnum.)
And here they are together in a Z-Cars episode from 1964.
Trivia fans will be pleased that Sheila Hancock, who was married to John Thaw, played Miss Hannigan opposite Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks in the original London production of Annie.
After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.
As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing.
That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.
His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.
I was scrolling through the vintage editions of Desert Island Discs on the BBC website and found that Osborne was the castaway in one of them. Only six minutes remain of his 1959 appearance (he was on the programme again in 1982), but during them he confirms this story about No Room at the Inn.
A spokesperson for the trust that runs the museum told the Swindon Advertiser:
"Our little museum has been growing – more events, more activities, more volunteers and more visitors.
"But we think it is time to grow some more, by creating something that will help the old farm site accommodate everything that's going on.
"So, we have come up with an idea for a new building to honour the things that were important to Jefferies, and are important to us."
You can read more about Richard Jefferies and his importance as a writer and thinker on the museum website.
Back in the Nineties I wrote my MA dissertation about Jefferies and gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture. The lecture took place in the church hall at Aldbourne in Wiltshire – the village where the classic Doctor Who story The Dæmons was filmed in 1971.
The government’s proposed model for mandatory reporting of suspected child sexual abuse bears no resemblance to the frameworks used in the 82 per cent of countries that have enacted such legislation, argues Tom Perry.
Jonathan Cook believes the jury was right to acquit the Palestine Action defendants.
"It was the only post-war building on London’s South Bank to remain unlisted, refused protection on six separate occasions by successive culture secretaries, who since 1991 had repeatedly rejected Historic England’s (formerly English Heritage) recommendations." Richard Waite on the Listing of the South Bank Centre – that's the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery and their associated terraced walkways and stairs – after 35 years of refusals.
"The shifting appeal of The West Wing during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026?" Karrin Vasby Anderson and Nick Marx track the political drama's move from bipartisan hit to a polarised comfort watch.
Mansel Stimpson enjoyed Nouvelle Vague as I much as I did: "The casting ... which uses mainly relatively unfamiliar faces is one of the film's great successes. It is quite easy to accept Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Aubry Dullin catches the essence of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo. Even more surprisingly given that Breathless contains an iconic performance by Jean Seberg, we find this film’s best-known name, Zoey Deutch, creating a Seberg in whom we really do believe."
When Reform UK formed a minority administration at Leicestershire County Council last May, 22-year-old Joseph Baum was made deputy leader and the cabinet member for adult social care. He had lost both roles by August.
Now comes news that Reform's council leader, Dan Harrison – who has to play Captain Mainwaring to Boam's Private Pike – wants him out of the party altogether and has written to Richard Tice to that effect.
BBC News reports:
In a letter seen by the BBC, Dan Harrison criticised his former deputy council leader Joseph Boam over a social media post in which he stated "I stand with ICE" hours after federal immigration agents fatally shot nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month.
In his letter, Harrison said that 79 complaints had been made against Reform UK councillors since the party took control, of which 40 were about Boam:
"What has been Joseph's reaction?" Harrison added. "He blamed it all on the woke left-wing, fake news or political smears.
"I was appalled at his lack of ownership of the problems he created."
Harrison said the ICE post was "the final straw", prompting him to contact Tice.
He added: "I know other party members will be writing to you to urge you to kick Joseph out of the party.
Leicester Gazette reminds us that another Leicestershire Reform councillor made pro-ICE comments, but has since withdrawn them and apologised.
Boam himself claims to be well thought of at Reform head office. Which may, of course, be true.
It is axiomatic for liberals that power ought to be dispersed and accountable. The Liberal Democrats tends to be fairly good at articulating this when it comes to political structures – supporting an elected House of Lords, empowering local government, opposing mayors and PCCs who have "dubious democratic mandates and little scrutiny".
In contrast, the party’s approach to concentrated and unaccountable power that derives from wealth, as distinct from politics, is much more patchy. Ed Davey should be credited for his response to the Epstein scandal, and for standing up to Elon Musk on a range of issues. But he has been unwilling to move much beyond a critique of bad individual American billionaires, to the illiberal concentration of power which great wealth inevitably entails.
With reference to tech oligarchs, he writes:
I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals … to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people. That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them.
This is an excellent starting point, but needs to be supported by tangible and far-reaching policies.
The existence of all billionaires* is a structural problem. There are perhaps three broad reasons why the Liberal Democrats have not sufficiently acknowledged this, but each can be challenged.
First, some billionaires fund worthy causes, from the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, to Sir Chris Hohn’s support for action on climate change. Joseph Rowntree died in 1925, but his philanthropy continues to do a great deal of good, inspired by liberal values. Yet even if they are sympathetic characters, that doesn’t negate the systemic problem that billionaires are inherently over-mighty.
Liberal Democrats rightly reject the ‘good chap’ approach to Britain’s political institutions, which assumes the benign personal qualities of political actors. They are right to insist on robust formal structures, based on a written constitution. We wouldn’t want hereditary peers in the House of Lords, even if they all had the sensibilities of successive Earls Russell. And the same should go for billionaires: however well-meaning, they shouldn’t be allowed to wield unaccountable power, or pass it on to their children, which means that they shouldn’t be allowed to amass wealth beyond a certain point.
Secondly, there may be electoral calculation at play. Liberal Democrat voters, and constituencies represented by the party’s MPs, tend to be wealthier than average. It is sensible to be hesitant about alienating people who earn comfortable salaries and own detached houses. But hostility to the existence of billionaires need not entail this.
The sort of affluent citizen in her fifties in Tunbridge Wells, who now votes Liberal Democrat, but previously supported Blair and Cameron, knows all about the malign effects of the concentration of wealth. She knows about her daughter's experience in the rental market, about her father's experience in a care home owned by private equity, and her own experience of a water company which exists solely to amass capital for its investors.
The party is well able to make it clear to her that hostility to the existence of billionaires is not an attack on her bourgeois lifestyle. And it is an electoral imperative, too, because we want her daughter, and the staff of her father’s care home (and her father!) to vote for the Liberal Democrats, and to become involved in the party.
The third obstacle is perhaps the most deeply rooted within Liberal Democrat thinking. There is a very sound liberal instinct to let people get on with their own personal and collective projects, without impediment or judgementalism. The distinction between public and private spheres of life is essential to liberalism. If someone wants to devote her energies to climbing the very highest Himalayas, or being the greatest ever tennis player, or winning at chess, or studying hard and becoming an eminent professor, then she is welcome to get on with it.
But being a billionaire is never a private choice: it is inherently public, because decisions about how to invest and spend so much money have an enormous effect, even if the billionaire doesn’t make overt political interventions, such as donating to a political party, or underwriting a newspaper.
And the existence of billionaires inevitably induces some politicians to serve their interests, even if less cravenly than Peter Mandelson. Great wealth is inherently different in kind, not just in scale, from the resources of the bulk of the population, and this is inherently political.
So, one of the central aims of the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy should be to inhibit the creation and continuation of billionaires. I won’t go into the details of this, but starting points would include different approaches to taxing wealth (especially land), to inheritance, to regulating monopolies and oligopolies, and to the offshore tax havens controlled by Britain.
At the moment, it seems that the Liberal Democrats are willing to be tough on (some) billionaires, but not on the causes of billionaires. This isn’t a call for the class warfare of the far left, or the inchoate left-populism of Zack Polanski’s Green Party, but to work through the implications of liberal insights when applied to economic power, as well as to political structures.
Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.
* I use "billionaire" as a shorthand for "an individual or family possessing so much wealth that it would distort a liberal society". I suspect the relevant amount is much less than one billion pounds, but won’t pursue that here.
A document found in the Leicestershire Record Office shows that the language was used in a marriage ceremony at St Martin's Church – now Leicester Cathedral – on 6 February 1576.
The BBC News report helpfully transcribes part of it:
Thomas Tillsye and Ursula Russel were marryed: and because the sayde Thomas was and is naturally deafe and also dumbe, so that the order of the forme of marriage used usually amongst others which can heare and speake could not for his parte be observed… the sayde Thomas, for the expression of his minde instead of words, of his own accorde used these signs…
First he embraced her with his armes, and took her by the hande, putt a ring upon her finger and layde his hande upon her harte, and held his hands towards heaven; and to show his continuance to dwell with her to his lyves ende he did it by closing of his eyes with his hands and digging out of the earthe with his foote, and pulling as though he would ring a bell with divers other signs approved.
In Sunday's service readings and prayers were made in British Sign Language and songs were sung by a deaf choir from the Church of the Good Shepherd – a ministry for deaf and hard of hearing people based in Leicester.
St Martin's Church became a cathedral when Leicester regained its city status in 1919. Leicester was a city under the Romans and was treated as one by the Domesday Book, but lost the title in the 13th century.
On Monday there was a Westminster Hall debate on Russian influence on UK politics and democracy, occasioned by a public petition that gained the required 100,000 signatures.
Allowing such petitions to trigger debates seems a worthwhile experiment, though the one demanding that MPs who change parties should be forced to resign and fight a by-election seems to me misconceived. Don't party whips have enough power as it is?
But it's worth reading the transcript of the debate on Russian interference. Several Liberal Democrats MPs took part – here's Cameron Thomas:
The breadth and depth of Russian influence is so vast and so dangerous to our democracy that no single political party has either the credibility or capacity to fully investigate it. Only a judge-led statutory public inquiry will suffice. The Government have the responsibility to deliver; the future of our democracy requires that they do so.
The House of Commons Library produced a briefing for the debate which is worth a look too.
It took 40 years for the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle to be recognised as one of the great albums of the Sixties, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that its opening track wasn't a hit as single.
But Care of Cell 44 sounds like 1967 sunshine in a bottle now: Mellotron, harmonies and a great bass part.
When I blogged about the Hulmes Ferry a couple of years ago, I discovered that the Manchester Ship Canal is a canalisation of the lower reaches of the River Irwell.
This video sets out to find what remains of those lower reaches between Salford and the Mersey at Eastham.
Last week MSPs from all parties paid their tributes to him as a motion of condolence was moved at Holyrood.
The presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, said:
This is my 27th year in the Scottish Parliament, and I know that, without Jim Wallace, Parliament would be a different place – a lesser one. Jim lived our parliamentary values of wisdom, integrity, justice and compassion, which were constantly demonstrated through his incredible career. His steadying hand in some challenging early days was just what was needed. Jim Wallace is a pillar of this Parliament.
The first minister, John Swinney, said:
Jim was a lifelong adherent of the Liberal tradition in Scotland. Although he led the Scottish Liberal Democrats, he first joined the Scottish Liberal Party, which emerged from a radical tradition of politics in our country, with a commitment in its foundations to home rule for Scotland. Consistent political support for the concept of Scottish self-government, pressure to establish a Scottish Parliament and the hard work to turn it into practice through the work of the consultative steering group were all part of the contribution that was made by Jim Wallace.
And our own Willie Rennie said:
Jim endured many political crises through his 13 years as party leader, six years as Deputy First Minister, five years as a UK Government minister and 43 years as a parliamentarian in three different Parliaments. Most politicians would have copious amounts of baggage as a result of those experiences, but such was the mark of his success that he went on to occupy the position of moderator, which is probably the closest to God that you can get in the Church of Scotland.
Last year, following the memorial service reception for George Reid in this Parliament, with a fierce storm raging outside, I took the unusual step of skipping canvassing in Fife that day. Instead, I joined Nicol Stephen, Jeremy Purvis and Jim for a very long lunch. I am so glad that I did. We shared memories, we traded gossip, and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed.
The judges have asked me to point out that my photograph shows alpacas, who would probably have pointed the offender on his way after asking him to admire their hairdos.
I saw Nouvelle Vague at the Phoenix in Leicester this afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed it. The film tells the story of the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature Au Bout de Souffle in 1959 and recreates a whole era: the black-and-white cinematography, the fashion, the music.
It manages both to laugh at and to laugh with Godard's pretensions and eccentricities, making him a compelling figure despite everything. Do not be surprised if you find me wearing dark glasses, smoking Gitanes and issuing gnomic, Godardesque pronouncements.
The blog post does not describe the film: the film bends towards the blog post.
Political activists are treated by their leaders as a stage army to be marched on and berated when they want to show the media how tough they are.
I wrote that in a recent article for Lion & Unicorn.
It strikes me that Keir Starmer and the people around him now treat Labour voters in much the same way.
The views reported in this tweet from yesterday afternoon shows what I have in mind. Because Net Zero and Rejoin are both popular with Labour voters.
Maybe the disappearance of Morgan McSweeney will see a change, but Starmer has little background in the Labour Party and no obvious love for it.
"For decades, Mandelson was both an irritant for the press and a reliable source of leaks, gossip, and backbiting. The part missing from many of the post-mortems on his political career that have appeared in newspapers and news programmes this week is how often he appeared as a media figure, treated as a 'sensible' big beast of British democracy." Mic Wright reminds us that the journalists pretending to be surprised about Peter Mandelson's character have used him as a resource for years.
Nathan Ley gives the reason why Council Tax keeps going up while council services get worse: the cost of adult social care.
Hedgehogs are disappearing fast – in fact they are vulnerable to extinction in the UK. Kate Moore lists some practical steps we can take to save them.
"The Amish community, along with their traditions, customs and way of life, serve as an integral part of the movie, not a picturesque backdrop to the main arc of the story." Sven Mikulec finds Peter Weir's Witness is a deep, subtle and complex social comment disguised as a police thriller.
The blog quotes Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, as welcoming Morgan McSweeney’s resignation but saying more needs to be done to tackle factionalism within the party:
"It is a start, but we need to know how decisions have been made in the Labour party, including the role of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, and how this whole culture will turn away from the factionalism to an inclusive culture which seeks to listen and engage MPs and prevent future errors over policy."
And the then it provides some context for her remarks:
It has been reported that McSweeney convened a "kitchen cabinet" of like-minded Labour figures who met on Sunday evenings at the London home of Roger Liddle, a Labour peer and old friend of Mandelson.
Liddle was made a peer in 2010 and took the Labour whip. You wouldn't know it from his Wikipedia entry but he was once a leading light of the SDP.
He was an SDP member throughout its existence (1981-88) and served on its national committee. He was then a Liberal Democrats until the mi-1990s,
Liddle was a parliamentary candidate for his old parties, fighting Vauxhall in 1983, the Fulham by-election in 1986, and Hertfordshire North in 1992.
He had been a special adviser to Bill Rodgers when he was a Labour minister before the 1979 general election and left Labour with him.
But later, with the rise of New Labour, Liddle became a close associate of Peter Mandelson and rejoined the party. In the days when I was on the Lib Dem federal policy committee and had a Commons press pass, he seemed to be at every political event I attended.
The family moved to Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, when Khan was five years old. She attended many of her family's squash matches, which she felt inspired her creativity: "The roar of the crowd is intense; it is ceremonial, ritualistic, I feel like the banner got passed to me but I carried it on in a creative way. It is a similar thing, the need to thrive on heightened communal experience."
After her father left the family when Khan was eleven, she taught herself to play the piano, which became "a channel to express things, to get them out".
To celebrate the day, here is his description of the effect the building of the London to Birmingham railway had on Camden:
The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood.
Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.
There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.
This is all one paragraph in Dombey and Son, but I feel sure that Dickens would use shorter ones if he were writing a blog post.
Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, kidnap and deport undocumented residents. The goons soon found themselves outnumbered, as well as watched, followed, tracked and sometimes stymied by rapidly organised networks of civilians, who use text chains, plastic whistles, car horns and in one case a trombone to discomfit the would-be kidnappers and warn their potential victims."
Anna Fazackerley and Tam Patachako travel to Southend to see what happens to a city when its university closes.
"The 'laissez-faire' of free trade was ... less an ideological commitment to the free market or a desire to give free rein to rich capitalists as it was an effort to feed the poor, foster world peace and cosmopolitan friendship, and erode the baleful and unjustly got power of land-owning aristocrats." Paul Crider speaks up for Manchester Liberalism.
"She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural." Jonathan Jones goes to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum, Cardiff.
Cavan Scott encounters Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh in New York.
