The Joy of Six 1553

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."

Plans for horse laundry facility at farm approved

Embed from Getty Images

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale from West Yorkshire. The judges were left wondering just how large the washing machines are going to be.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents

Yes, Jeremy Thorpe really did pester the voters from a hovercraft that summer and Paul Tyler was on board. Lord Tyler's lawyers have asked me to point out, however, that at no time did he turn into the Beast of Bodmin at full moon or devour his then constituents.

I bet he did though.

Tuesday

Do you remember when hovercraft were all the rage? The boffins told us that within a decade we would have one each and use them to commute to the moon. As it turned out, they proved a great disappointment, but it was aboard a hovercraft that I first discovered this charming resort. Jeremy Thorpe had hit upon the idea of visiting the beaches of the South during the summer of 1974 to firm up the Liberal vote in anticipation of a second general election that autumn. 

I think it fair to say that we met with a Mixed Reception from holidaymakers – it was the way the natives of Trescothick Bay lobbed bottles at us that convinced me the village was a nest of free-thinkers among whom I should like to spend more time. 

Not everyone saw things that way. Poor Paul Tyler was so traumatised that he could be found 25 years later wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents who had lacked the sense to bolt their doors, bar their shutters and remain in their cottages. Thank goodness one of the Wise Woman of Wing’s tinctures sorted him out!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"

Steve Winwood and Viv Stanshall: Boy in Darkness

"I suppose I sort of went underground a little," Steve Winwood once told Classic Rock, looking back on the mid Seventies:

One of his 'underground' activities involved a musical liaison with the eccentric Bonzo Dog man Viv Stanshall. The pair had already co-written Dream Gerrard for Traffic's swansong album and collaborated on Stanshall's solo record Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. They then concocted a soundtrack for a film version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, hoping for financial backing. It never arrived.

They did, however, manage to funnel some of its ideas into Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Stanshall's surreal satire of upper-English mores that was eventually made into a film starring Trevor Howard in the title role.

"Viv was hilarious," Winwood says, laughing. "He always sort of needed a straight man to do the musical things that he was wanting to do. And for a while I became that. We'd go into pubs and people's houses and start off some kind of act. I'd play some music, he'd play a bit on his euphonium, then try to do conjuring tricks."

A track said to be from their Gormenghast project, Boy in Darkness, was included on Dog Howl in Tune, an album put together from the confused archive Viv Stanshall left at his death by his son Rupert.

And then the other day I found this track. It too is called Boy in Darkness and it has much the same time as the Viv Stanshall one, though different words. But here Winwood, who presumably wrote that tune, is playing keyboards and Stanshall the euphonium. The band, the YouTube blurb speculates, may be filled out by Traffic members Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee on percussion and bass guitar respectively.

This video was posted there by Berkin Altınok, whose account is filled with Winwood rarities and covers of his songs.

My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New Deal

This article appears in the new Liberator – you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about.

You can find The New Deal online.

Lib Dem Narrative – The Search Goes On

The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals’ brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is a feeling of deflation among many Lib Dems. May’s local elections, whose outcome was in some ways very good for the party, were followed by a series of posts on Lib Dem Voice expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s direction or at least arguing that its current approach had been exhausted and a new one was needed.

This dissatisfaction arises from a sense of disappointment. If we have so many MPs, why aren’t we more central to the political debate? You can blame the media all you like, and they certainly do us no favours, but maybe the problem lies deeper than that. If we were allowed to write out own newspaper headlines, do we know what they would be? The approach with which we fought the last election – three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can’t win here – and its continuation after that election have left us with a limited number of headline policies.

Massive failures

Where we do have them, they aren’t necessarily as strong as we try to make them sound. We won support at the last election by campaigning on the massive failures of the water companies, but what would we do about them? The answer is that we would appoint a new, tougher regulator. The trouble with this is that the model promised at privatisation – businesses that displayed market-driven efficiency and went in fear of powerful regulators – has never looked like working. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that the water industry is a natural monopoly. The second is regulatory capture, the process by which public institutions that are set up to keep an industry in check are subverted so they come to act in its interests. Nothing about the Lib Dems’ proposals for the water industry suggests they have found the answer to either of these problems.

Then there is the party’s performance in opinion polls and local elections. When it comes to the polls, despite the collapse of the Labour vote, we are happy if we see one where we match the 12 per cent of the vote we achieved at the last general election. We may remember Zack Polanski as an ambitious Liberal Democrat who was keener on austerity than most of us, but as James Butler wrote in the London Review of Books: 

Polanski’s political journey … is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.

We need to have more to offer such voters than we do at present.

Our vote is now heavily concentrated in the parliamentary constituencies that we won in 2024. We gained dozens upon dozens of councillors there in May, but I saw debate as to whether we had gained or lost councillors across all the other constituencies. What is certain is that our vote in seats where we have not been active in recent years is as low as one or two per cent, as is demonstrated weekly in local by-elections. And while we are being worried, the party’s membership is generally estimated to be 60,000, which is barely half what it was in 2022.

Many of the areas we now represent are prosperous, which means we must beware of simply representing their interests. Our opposition to inheritance tax on land, for instance, is hard to defend. As far as farmers have a grievance, it’s that the price of land has lost its relationship with the income that can be derived from farming it. But if you allow land to be used as a tax shelter, that problem will not be solved, it will get worse.

In the end, the Liberal Democrat hold on the seats they gained in 2024 may be out of their hands. In order for disillusioned Conservatives to come over to the Lib Dems, it is necessary for them not to be too scared by the possibility of a Labour government. If Andy Burnham turns out to be more Socialist than anyone expects, or at least if the press succeeds in getting the public to see him that way, then there is a danger that those voters will flock back to the Tories, however sensible or moderate we have been.

Against the background of this complicated political landscape comes The New Deal: How the Liberal Democrats Should Go into the 2029 General Election. It’s billed as “a pre-manifesto strategy document from the Yorkist group of Liberal Democrat activists” and, in his foreword, William Wallace explains its purpose:

This paper aims to start a conversation within the party on the narrative we need to construct. We have at most three years until the next election. Too many voters have come to despair of any political party’s ability to overcome the country’s economic stagnation and social divides. Liberal Democrats must find a way to offer them hope that national renewal – economic, social and political – is possible and attainable.”

To that end, The New Deal offers an analysis of the electoral position of the Liberal Democrats, a narrative they should develop before the next election and the policies it says flow from that narrative.

When The New Deal was published in May, it seemed that both the Greens and Reform UK were in line to make sweeping gains at the next election and that the Liberal Democrats would have to change their strategy to take account of this. Since then, both parties have faltered. The Greens appear to have hit their ceiling in the opinion polls and the media have at last started to ask hard questions about how Reform and its leader are funded. This position may change again, of course, but at the moment it seems the 2029 election may be more like the 2024 election than we expected.

Usefully, The New Deal considers the parties along two axes. There is the conventional one of Progressive/Centre Left vs Authoritarian/Orthodox, which sees the Liberal Democrats lined up with Labour, the Nationalists and the Greens against the Conservatives and Reform. From their history, their members and their voters, the Liberal Democrats are inescapably an anti-Conservative party, though that doesn’t mean that, deep down, we are the same as Labour or that ‘Progressive’ is a meaningful political identity rather than just a more impressive way of saying you are against the Tories.

The second axis is System vs Anti System, which sees the Lib Dems (and we still just about deserve this) placed in the Anti-System camp along with the Greens, the Nationalists and Reform, while Labour and the Tories share the System end. 

Anti-system

This ‘anti-system’ concept is a useful one and helps explain why, to the bafflement of the simplicities of social media, there are many voters who choose between Reform and the Liberal Democrats. It’s an identity that I suspect has something to do with being a long way from the centres of power, as voters are in Cornwall or Lincolnshire, and perhaps with the area being a historical stronghold of religious Nonconformity. As academics always say, more research is needed.

The New Deal emphasises the importance of developing a narrative, identifying Keir Starmer’s failure to do this as a key reason for his premiership foundering, but I’m not sure that what they’ve come up with quite fits the bill:

We are a better country than this! We are a kind, welcoming people, proud of our traditions, keen not to be taken for fools, but happy to be a modern, compassionate civic nation. We believe in a helping-hand role for a benign state, but one that doesn’t encroach any more into private lives than is strictly necessary. We believe in giving power back to the people, and in making all votes of equal value. 

This is a collection of four sentences, two of which are immediately qualified with a “but…”, that fails to tell a story. Stories involve movement through time or space, but these words just sit there. And they are statements about the Liberal Democrats when what is needed is a story about Britain today that will make voters nod in assent.

So an effective Liberal Democrat narrative might look more like:

In recent years politicians have looked to party interest rather than what’s good for Britain, the gap between rich and poor has grown too wide, and young people are finding it too hard to get a start in life. We need to rebuild our democracy, make it easier for people from all homes to make the most of their talents, and revive social housing.

That’s what’s on the back of my envelope, anyway.

When it comes to the paper’s policy offer, the cover leads you to expect great things because it has a mock-up of FDR wearing a Lib Dem rosette. In fact, it’s not always clear how different this New Deal would be. There are places where it talks about “success and progress being about more than GDP, including measures of social wellbeing and the environment” and “markets working for society rather than society being there to support markets”, but it’s not clear what these encouraging sentiments would mean in practice. Nor is it clear what the “unashamedly Keynesian” policy it wants to see at the next election would be. It seems to envisage more government intervention in the economy, which is welcome, but Keynes’s great theoretical innovation was the idea of demand management to avoid the cycle of economic booms and slumps. I’m not sure that’s on offer here.

But there are some very good ideas in The New Deal, and not only rejoining the European Union either. There’s a welcome emphasis on localism, and the inevitable support for electoral reform is strengthened by a call for it to be “linked to some form of bottom-up democracy to allow citizens to generate legislation, and to take more control over their local affairs”. There’s a call for the provision of rented accommodation (though it doesn’t say in which sector) and for an emphasis on “doing up the housing at the bottom of the ladder which is a health hazard for many of those living in it”. Education is there too, with a thoroughly Liberal emphasis on the importance of teaching critical thinking.

Above all, it’s great to see Liberal Democrat members publishing their ideas in a long form. Since the demise of Lib Dem News and then political blogging, communication within the party has tended to be very short (hello social media) or very top down. I hope The New Deal will be the first of many such publications.

Neal Ascherson on Berlin in the second world war

Embed from Getty Images

Neil Ascherson writes about Berlin in the current issue of the London Review of Books:

Berlin is a strange, parvenu capital which shakes itself and becomes unrecognisable every few generations. The little Prussian town suddenly becomes the pompous capital of an empire, which collapses into a defeated rump republic, which turns into the powerhouse of the Third Reich, which is bombed shapeless, then divided into two by a wall. And now united again, with a new government centre worthy of that old parvenu pomposity.

Reviewing Ian Buruma's book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45, he says of the city during the war:

Berliners were certainly aware that 'Jew trains' were leaving for somewhere whence no passengers returned. Buruma writes that "the desire to look away, to pretend ignorance, to be wilfully oblivious, must have been the norm, even among highly educated Germans." 

As a British wartime child living near secret things and sites, I can remember easily respecting the instruction: "Just forget you saw that!" But years later in Germany, I learned how often young men on leave had confided hideous things they had seen to their mothers or sisters. 

In the last year of the war, as Buruma confirms, the fear that gripped Berliners was not just of military defeat but of vengeance.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"

The new Liberator is out. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

And that means it's time to spend another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer. When I first mentioned the Well-Behaved Orphans' summer holiday in the pages of Liberator, Marcus Trescothick was a 14-year-old playing alongside his father for the Keynsham club in Bristol. In those days the WBOs went to a different Cornish resort: Trebilcock Bay.

Monday

I write these words in a deckchair on the sands of Trescothick Bay, the Cornish resort where I always bring the Well-Behaved Orphans for their summer holiday. As I watch, the mites are scaling the cliffs their predecessors have always declared to be "better than a chimbley", while Cook, who has accompanied us this time, is searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies". 

One advantage of being away from the Hall and Westminster is that I am no longer being pestered by Liberal Democrat HQ about what has become of Freddie and Fiona. Between you and me, gentle reader, I rather thought they had been burnt alive in a giant wicker hare by the Elves of Rockingham Forest at Beltane, but just before I left for Cornwall I overheard two young elves complaining that the "penguin ladies" had turned up at the eleventh hour to spoil their fun. 

Can it be that the sisters from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes rescued F&F from the flames? I shall pump Sister Sid on my return to Rutland.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

A cross between Biggles, Tintin, the Famous Five and Fitzcarraldo

George Weeks posted the link to this the other day, saying:

I love the BBC Archive YouTube channel. So much footage to enjoy. This one is possibly my favourite: The Trans-African Hovercraft Expedition of 1969-70. It's a cross between Biggles, Tintin, Famous Five and Fitzcarraldo.

And he was right.

This film was shot in Francophone Africa, and though I know from a recent rabbit hole that British Africa had all but crumbled by 1962 when Sammy Going South was released, but it's still tempting to place hovercraft beside flying boats and airships as new means of transport that promised to make it possible to maintain the Empire but fell short.

Like Sammy Going South, the film also makes clear the importance of the Muslim faith to Central Africa. And there are thoughtful interludes on slavery and colour that would still be impressive today.

George Orwell on the style and quality of C.S. Lewis's arguments

When I wrote about the philosopher C.E.M. Joad last month, a comment suggested I read one of George Orwell's 'As I Please' columns from Tribune. 

In it (it was the column for the 27 October 1944 issue), Orwell defended Joad as someone associated in the public mind with Science and Rationalism (his capitals), unlike the religious right-wingers who tended to dominate debate on the BBC.

But the column was mostly about C.S. Lewis and Orwell's criticism of his writing style and the quality of his arguments. It's worth quoting at length:

Reading, a week or two ago, Mr C. S. Lewis’s recently-published book, Beyond Personality (it is a series of reprinted broadcasts on theology), I learned from the blurb on the dust jacket that a critic who should, and indeed does, know better had likened an earlier book, The Screwtape Letters, to The Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘I do not hesitate to compare Mr Lewis’s achievement with Pilgrim’s Progress’ were his quoted words. Here is a sample, entirely representative, from the later book:

Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There’s a bad kind, where the pretence is instead of the real thing, as when a man pretends he’s going to help you instead of really helping you. But there’s also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. When you’re not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a much nicer chap than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we've all noticed. you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That’s why children’s games are so important. They're always pretending to be grown-up – playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-ups helps them in earnest.

The book is like this all the way through, and I think most of us would hesitate a long time before equating Mr Lewis with Bunyan. One must make some allowance for the fact that these essays are reprinted broadcasts, but even on the air it is not really necessary to insult your hearers with homey little asides like "you know" and "mind you", or Edwardian slang like "awfully", "jolly well", "specially" for "especially", "awful cheek" and so forth. The idea, of course, is to persuade the suspicious reader, or listener, that one can be a Christian and a "jolly good chap" at the same time. I don’t imagine that the attempt would have much success, and in any case the cotton wool with which the BBC stuffs its speakers’ mouths makes any real discussion of theological problems impossible, even from an orthodox angle. But Mr Lewis’s vogue at this moment, the time allowed to him on the air and the exaggerated praise he has received, are bad symptoms and worth noticing.

Students of popular religious apologetics will notice early in the book a side-kick at "all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own", and various hints that unbelief is "out of date", "old-fashioned" and so forth. And they will remember Ronald Knox saying much the same thing fifteen years ago, and R. H. Benson twenty or thirty years before that, and they will know in which pigeon-hole Mr Lewis should be placed.

And Orwell goes on to describe that pigeon-hole: 

A kind of book that has been endemic in England for quite sixty years is the silly-clever religious book, which goes on the principle not of threatening the unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass, incapable of clear thought and unaware that everything he says has been said and refuted before. ... The line of attack is always the same. Every heresy has been uttered before (with the implication that it has also been refuted before); and theology is only understood by theologians (with the implication that you should leave your thinking to the priests). Along these lines one can, of course, have a lot of clean fun by ‘correcting loose thinking’ and pointing out that so-and-so is only saying what Pelagius said in A.D. 400 (or whenever it was), and has in any case used the word transubstantiation in the wrong sense.

Lewis is still a revered figure among British Evangelicals, and in the US he enjoys an extraordinary reputation, so much so that there are those who seek his canonisation, but I think Orwell got it about right here.

London tram driven the wrong way through Croydon town centre

Ian Visits wins our Headline of the Day Award for what turns out to be a piece of good news:

The successful trial gives London Trams much greater flexibility during the engineering works. Instead of forcing passengers onto the inevitable replacement buses, trams can be repositioned through the town centre to continue serving routes to New Addington, Elmers End and Beckenham Junction.

Dennis Potter's 1975 dramatisation of Angus Wilson's Late Call

Angus Wilson is an example of a once highly regarded writer who has disappeared from view. I read his books when I was a teenager and enjoyed them, but they are now out of print.

I also have fond memories of Dennis Potter's television dramatisation of Wilson's novel Late Call from 1975. Today I discovered that all four parts of it are on YouTube, so I have included the first one here. I've not watched it for 51 years, so apologies if it does not live up to my memories of it.

Margaret Drabble once wrote about the novel:

My most memorable holiday book is Angus Wilson’s Late Call, which I read on holiday in Morocco, or rather on my way to Morocco, for I think I read it on the boat from Marseille to Tangier. I had discovered Wilson’s work while still at university and eagerly read each book as it was published; this novel, which came out in 1964, was as gripping as all the others had been, and very unexpected. 

It’s the story of a newly retired hotel manageress trying to adapt to life with her widowed headmaster son in a new town. It’s full of social comedy and human tragedy, and I remember being utterly gripped by the wholly real world Wilson created. It was a perfect companion on a trip that was at times rather unsettling. 

I don’t know how a sophisticated and highly educated man such as Wilson can have entered so fully into this woman’s hopes and fears, but he did. It’s also more experimental than it looks in terms of narrative technique. It was made into a TV series in which Dandy Nichols played the main role brilliantly.

Even as a teenager, I recognised there was something special about a novel in which the lead character who grows and makes a new life for herself is an old woman.

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.

The Joy of Six 1552

Alice McCool investigates the web of culture-war connections – from the US Christian right to Viktor Orbán's influence network – that lay behind the first British CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) conference.

It's all well and good saying we should regulate social media. But social media is already regulated. So why is it failing? And what could we do in response? Chaminda Jayanetti has some ideas.

Keyana Sapp explains why American cookware is getting worse: "Once you understand the brand licensing structure, you see it everywhere, and the pattern is always the same: one company owns the name, a different company makes the product, and the factory that earned the name is liquidated."

"Around the time those tower blocks were going up, as John Pendlebury recounts, local preservationists and councillors in York teamed up to imaginatively restore and repopulate the historic precinct inside the city walls – an early example of a heritage-driven strategy that Newcastle and Liverpool would seize on a few decades later." Susan Pedersen reviews The Modern British City 1945-2000, edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith.

"The gulf between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' in county cricket is wider than ever before, and is set to grow further still in the wake of last year's Hundred equity sale, according to a new report into the domestic game's finances." Cricinfo has some worrying but not unexpected news.

Peter Bradshaw watches Andrei Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia (1983).

Alexander Mackendrick and Sweet Smell of Success

At Ealing Studios, Alexander Mackendrick directed one masterpiece, The Ladykillers, and four more of the best films made there: Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy and The 'Maggie'.

When Ealing folded he went to Hollywood, where his first film was the noir Sweet Smell of Success. Though it failed in America on its release in 1957, it is now recognised as another masterpiece and is the subject of this superior video masterclass.

Mackendrick then suffered the indignity of being taken off two consecutive films and so did not complete another until 1963, when he made Sammy Going South for his old Ealing boss Michael Balcon.

Realising that he was no Hollywood hustler, Mackendrick turned, as you will see in the video, to academia. He became the founding dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts (now the CalArts School of Film/Video), giving up that position in 1978 to become a professor there.

A collection of his hand outs and lectures was published as On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director in 2005, with an introduction by Martin Scorsese.

When I mentioned another Ealing film, Hue and Cry, in a piece for Lion & Unicorn, I suggested that it "feels more Roberto Rosselini than Ealing." What I didn't know when I wrote that was that the wartime British official who gave Rosselini permission to shoot Rome, Open City was Alexander Mackendrick.

RMT calls three one-day strikes over Midland Main Line safety

The latest news on East Midlands Rail's unsatisfactory new trains is that the largest railway trade union has called three one-day strikes over its concern that they are unsafe. As BBC News puts it:

A union that represents railway staff has announced plans for its members at East Midlands Railway (EMR) to take strike action over "growing safety concerns the company has failed to address".

The RMT union said it had been in dispute with EMR since April following the rollout of the 810 fleet (Aurora), which it said had been operating with a "significant number" of faults.

It said its members planned to take strike action on Saturday 1 August and the following two Saturdays.

I find these paragraphs in this report particularly worrying:

According to the RMT, EMR has been sending trains into service that are "likely to fail and require a full reset which leaves the train with no active safety systems".

The BBC has seen an operational briefing, which informs control, signalling and operations staff about undertaking an Aux Off / Aux On reset on EMR class 810 units - which may be required to recover certain faults.

"The process takes approximately 20 minutes and results in the temporary loss of several safety-critical systems, creating an increased risk of an uncontrolled evacuation and removing the driver's normal means of communication with the signaller," it states. 

This does tend to cast doubt on EMR's assurances to BBC News that the Aurora trains' shortcomings have no safety implications.

And I can't be the only person who is thinking again about the rail collision near Bedford last month.

There, according to a later Guardian report, an Aurora service from Nottingham to London halted unexpectedly because a fault caused an automatic application of its brakes. This train was then struck in the rear by a Corby to London service that had ignored a red signal:

Investigations continue but it appears that another train protection and warning system (TPWS), widely used on the railway system and designed to automatically stop trains if they pass a red signal, was not installed on this stretch of the Midland mainline.

No wonder RMT is up in arms.

It's not as if EMT has been candid over its problems with the Auroras. It's less than a week since BBC News published a story with the headline:

East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?

Harry Chapin: W.O.L.D.

Being a DJ? Turns out it's a less than poptastic business.

Aided by heavy rotation on Radio 1, with whose DJs it must have struck a chord, this reached no. 34 in the UK singles chart in 1973.

Harry Chapin, a talented singer-songwriter, died in a car crash at the age of 38.

Michelin-starred restaurateur faces jail for using ants as dessert garnish

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from Korea.

The judges decided to have the trifle.

In the Britain of 1940 cars were deadlier than German bombs

Embed from Getty Images

Here's a remarkable quotation from a judge that I found in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (24 July 1940).

After a defendant had been found not guilty of manslaughter and of dangerous driving, Mr Justice Stable said:

"I hope this will be a warning to him and I hope that he and other members of the public will appreciate that during June the whole forces of the German Empire succeeded in killing exactly 100 fewer people in this island with bombs than were killed by motorists by accidents." 

Exploring the Ivanhoe Line east of Coalville

With the Leicester Mercury reporting a new push to restore passenger services to the railway line from Leicester to Burton upon Trent, it's time to visit it again with Our History Underfoot.

In May we saw the line between Burton and Coalville, which hasn't carried any goods traffic for two years and is already showing signs of decay.

This time we go east from Coalville about half the way to Leicester. Matt sees, or at least hears, more quarry traffic than he expected and comes across relics of the district's early railway history. 

A third video will complete his journey to Leicester.

The Joy of Six 1551

 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

Kevin Keegan: The humble superstar of the Seventies

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Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.

But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.

During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg. 

This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.

His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.

As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.

Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.

Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.

The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.

George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.

But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.

Péter Magyar will ask Judit Polgár to become president of Hungary

Later. The Guardian reports that Judit Polgár has said she will decline this offer:

Polgár, 49, said later in a Facebook post that she was grateful to ‌be asked but added: "I do not feel enough strength within me to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, ​so I am unable to accept the request."

Judit Polgár, widely regarded as the strongest ever woman chess player, is to to be offered the presidency of Hungary. 

The Guardian reports that the Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar will meet Polgar to discuss the matter on Monday:

"Our country needs unity, peace and a president that all Hungarians can be proud of," he wrote on social media. "Judit Polgár's name has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades."

The announcement by Magyar follows a months-long standoff between the newly elected leader and Tamás Sulyok, the president appointed during former leader Viktor Orbán’s time in power.

Since his landslide victory in April, Magyar has repeatedly called on Sulyok to step down, accusing him of being an Orbán "puppet" who had failed to stand up for the country as Orbán’s rightwing, nationalist Fidesz party was criticised for weakening democratic institutions and undermining the rule of law.

Last week Hungary’s parliament – where Magyar’s Tisza party holds a two-thirds majority – voted to back a constitutional amendment that included an immediate end to Sulyok’s term.

In the video above, the inimitable American grandmaster Ben Finegold takes us through three characteristic wins by Polgar. It seems it's impossible now to turn off the subtitles in an embedded video, so please watch it on YouTube if they distract you.

After Dark podcast on the R101 airship disaster

The latest edition of the BBC's After Dark podcast deals with the R101 airship disaster of 1930:

"It's like the Titanic, except you've never heard of it. And in a way, it's even weirder."

So says today's guest, Cautionary Tales' host, Tim Harford, about the disastrous story he's taking Anthony and Maddy through.

Airships were the ocean liners of the skies, and in the 1920s, Britain had ambitions to connect the Empire in this way. Until it all went tragically wrong.

I blogged about this myself back in 2022. There I suggested that the way the victims of the disaster lay in state in Westminster Hall might be a measure of the hopes the government had invested in this means of transport as a way of keeping up the Empire. From what Tim Harford says, I was right.

And he was as amazed as I was by this – the quotation comes from the Great Disasters site:

The most important part of the airship – the bit that provides that lift – is, obviously, the gas itself, and the giant gasbags holding it. They were painstakingly made from "gold-beater skin" – a particular membrane taken from an ox’s intestine. 

It had taken something like a million oxen to make the R101's gasbags, which were prepared on-site by a team of women who scraped, washed, stretched and glued them into their final form. 

The R101 design team had tested various other materials, but came to the conclusion that gold-beater skin, the tried and tested option, was the best then available.

As I wrote in my blog post:

A million oxen to make one airship? This conjures up a Dieselpunk world where the skies are filled with airships and whole continents are given over to raising the billions of oxen that demands.

Soho Parish primary: Without this school it’s all just tourists, isn’t it?

We're used to stories of rural primary schools closing, but yesterday the Guardian had something different: a report on the uncertain fate of Soho Parish C of E primary school:

Sandwiched between a strip club, a West End theatre and a pub might not be the most obvious location for a school but Soho Parish C of E primary has thrived for decades among the colourful charms of inner London.

But in an area that once had 16 schools, Soho Parish is the last remaining and its time may soon be up, a victim of the post-Covid downturn and falling pupil numbers that are forecast to close hundreds of primary schools across England.

In his article, the paper's education editor Tim Adams quoted a couple of parents. One said:

"The problem is that people around here aren’t having children. There’s actually council housing hidden here and there but there’s nothing much for families. It’s mainly old people and single people. That’s up to the council."

And a second:

"Without this school it’s all just tourists, isn’t it?"

But this sort of story about urban schools will soon become familiar. Adams says:

Westminster has already experienced the largest decline in primary pupil numbers among local authorities, a fall of 16 per cent in the past five years. And new national forecasts suggest England is going the same way, with primary and nursery numbers falling by nearly 473,000 between now and 2031, the equivalent of more than 1500 primaries without pupils.

The Soho school is organising to resist closure and drawing up plans for the future, and it may be distinctive enough to survive. But may other urban primaries won't.

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Jonathan Simons fears that Labour have picked a new leader who communicates well, but whose instincts are wrong: "This easy, reflexive tilt back to the left being about class, and steel mills and coalfields and shipyards and dockyards, and Northern men in Northern towns, is politically weird in 2026."

"Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage. Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign." Carole Cadwalladr on the way the media allowed Nigel Farage to operate without scrutiny for so long and why things have suddenly changed.

"The phenomenon of ever-bigger cars has not come about accidentally. It has been sustained by an aggressive marketing campaign, as they are far more profitable for manufacturers than conventional-sized vehicles. They are sold on the basis that they are safer. Extra safety for your family is a key marketing strategy. But while Daddy drives Olivia and Rufus to school in perfect safety, other pupils are in greater peril. And that risk is growing as the cars get ever bigger." Christian Wolmar calls for a halt to carspreading.

Karina Colombo and Elisa Failache find that the rapid expansion of high-speed internet in Uruguay led to a reduction in children's test scores in communication, problem solving and social skills. But it wasn't because the children were spending too long online: it was because their parents were.

"Each retelling reflects contemporary concerns about technological risk, climate uncertainty, social inequality, disaster preparedness, media spectacle and the ethics of dark tourism while maintaining the same underlying core narrative." Jonathan Peter Skinner explains our undying interest in the sinking of the Titanic.

Lucy Janes says the River Clyde is central to modern Glasgow’s identity. "It flows through the core of the city and, as you look downstream, a moment's reflection can lead your mind’s eye out to sea and the wider world."

Django Django: Cameos

This is perhaps typical of the sort of track I hear on BBC Radio 6 Music and like. It's a little bit retro, stronger on melody than rhythm and involves white boys and guitars. Could it be that I'm getting old?

Still, Song Bar likes it too:

A crisp, catchy, acoustic sound with orchestral strings and their distinctive vocal harmony style sees a welcome return from the  London-based art-rock quartet of David Maclean, Vincent Neff, James Dixon and Thomas Grace, heralding their upcoming sixth LP Doveland, out in November via Clouds Hill. 

Produced by Nick McCarthy (Franz Ferdinand), the title of the album takes its name from an online urban myth: a supposedly vanished midwest town that appears on no maps, yet some believe they once lived there, even holding souvenirs as proof. 

In answer to the question in my first paragraph... No, they won't get me. And there's more about the Doveland myth online.

Welsh Lib Dems are short of peers and the Lords is weighted towards London and the South East of England

It's not just Shropshire's curlews who are facing extinction. Professor Russell Deacon, author of history of the Liberal and Liberal Democrat parties in Wales, has told Nation Cymru:

"The Liberal Democrats are a federal party with equality meant to be spread between England, Wales and Scotland but this seems to have been forgotten and in the House of Lords it’s very much an English Party!

"Not long ago there were six Welsh peers from Wales representing the Liberal Democrats; after the next general election because they can no longer attend after the age of 80 they will become extinct. This does not bode well for the future of Liberalism in Wales."

Welsh Liberal Democrats, says the news website are angry because for the 13th year running, none of them have been nominated for seats in the House of Lords.

And it points out that:

The Welsh Liberal Democrats currently have four members of the House of Lords: Baroness Christine Humphreys, who is 79; Lord Martin Thomas, who is 89; Lord Mike German, who is 81, and Lord Roger Roberts, who is 90.

A Lib Dem source is quoted as pointing out that we had no new appointments at all to the House of Lords between mid-2015 and mid-2024. This is true, but our problem of having a lack of Welsh peers remains.

The House of Lords is now a baroque institution with a huge unelected membership, and new members are as likely to be appointed as a consolation for political failure as they are for achieving eminence in their field. It belongs in Imperial China or Ruritania but not in a 21st-century democracy.

And it's membership is not equally drawn from across the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. In 2023 the House of Lords Library published a research paper breaking down its membership.

Looking at the nations, the percentage of Lords' members from each was:

England                  85.4

Scotland                   7.7

Wales                       4.1

Northern Ireland       2.6

Overseas                 0.2

And for the English regions it was:

London                                  24.2

South East                            20.8

East of England                    11.1

South West                            8.4

Yorkshire and the Humber     5.8

East Midlands                        4.3

North West                             4.3

West Midlands                       3.6

North East                              3.0

Once again, the UK is revealed to be wholly overcentralised, something which having London as its political, economic and cultural capital makes inevitable. Electing a second chamber from the nations and regions would at least ensure they had fair representation in it.

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.

"Everyone carried a shopping bag": Muriel Spark on London, 1945

This is from Muriel Spark's novel The Girls of Slender Means, which was published in 1963 and set in 1945:

These upper bedrooms looked down on the opposite pavement on the park side of the street, and on the tiny people who moved along in neat looking singles and couples, pushing little prams loaded with pin-head babies and provisions, or carrying little dots of shopping bags. 

Everyone carried a shopping bag in case they should be lucky enough to pass a shop that had a sudden stock of something off the rations.

Saving the curlew from extinction in Shropshire

Forty-eight young curlews are being released back into their natural habitat in the Shropshire hills as part of efforts to protect the species.

The scheme, which is run by the non-profit organisation Curlew Country, has seen eggs taken from wild nests and incubated, with the hatched chicks then raised in specially-constructed pens.

Amanda Perkins discussed this 'headstarting' process with BBC News:

"Our monitoring showed that no chick survived to fledging from any of the nests we looked at," she said, adding that the team "needed a desperate measure to try and hold the situation".

Perkins described the process, which is licensed by Natural England, as "a sort of sticking plaster" that will work "until we can get better natural nesting in place".

"In the wild, these chicks aren't surviving," she said.

The curlew is also listed in Shropshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy as a species that needs particular help.

Lynn Parker, who coordinates that strategy, also spoke to BBC News, saying that groups "need to work together", otherwise "we really will see curlews go extinct":

The strategy focuses on "landscape scale connectivity", she explained, adding that "really good quality grasslands or wetlands" are exactly what the curlews need.

As curlews like to nest on farmland, Parker praised the farming community for being "really supportive" of conservation efforts.

"They let people know where nests are, fence them off sometimes, and work with volunteers," she said.

With curlews marked as a "priority species" on the county's nature restoration plan, Parker said that seeing them thrive "would be great, but survive is kind of what we're working on at the moment".

This year's release of chicks is one step further towards "a situation where we're not at risk of losing this really iconic species for Shropshire", she added.

For me, the unique haunting cry of the curlew is the sound of the Shropshire hills and I wish the people working to keep them in that landscape every success.

East Midlands Railway cancels 20 fast services a day because of problems with its new trains

East Midlands Railways has admitted that its problems with its new trains have not all been caused by the recent hot weather.

BBC News reports:

A number of Intercity services, which run to and from London St Pancras, will be cancelled from Monday, while other services will have fewer carriages.

Will Rogers, managing director of EMR, said the performance of the Class 810 fleet had "fallen below the levels we and our customers expect" and that the timetable change was "necessary".

The Intercity services run between London and destinations including Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Sheffield.

EMR did not say how long the timetable changes would be in place for, but said in a statement they would remain in place while "EMR works with the manufacturer, Hitachi Rail, to resolve disruption for customers as soon as possible".

And the Guardian adds more detail:

EMR is cancelling about 20 fast trains a day between London, Sheffield and Nottingham, while others will also be short-formed and are likely to be crowded. Its new class 810 fleet, previously labelled Auroras when their launch was heralded less than a year ago, have suffered from what EMR has called “performance and reliability issues”.

The operator also criticised Hitachi’s maintenance of the existing fleet that the Auroras were due to replace, the class 222 trains, which it said had “significantly impacted upon EMR’s ability to run a consistent intercity service”.

Interestingly, BBC News ran a story only yesterday under the headline:

East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?

In it, my best friend from school, now secretary of the East Midlands branch of the passenger advocacy group Railfuture, said:

"a bit more transparency" around a recovery plan and the issues the operator was facing would be helpful for passengers.

We are not without influence.

The 810 trains are bi-modal – they're able to take power from overhead wires but also have their own diesel engines. They were ordered on Chris Grayling's watch after the Conservative government cancelled its plans to electrify the whole of the St Pancras main line. The wires run out at Wigston, a few miles south of Leicester.

But it's not all bad news. We're getting new taller ticket barriers at Market Harborough station to stop people without tickets boarding the trains that aren't running.

Big cat found in plant pot after two-month search

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from Norfolk.

A Savannah cat, like the one in the picture here, is a cross between a domestic cat and a small wild cat from Africa called a serval. So this one was probably rather on the small side for a big cat.

But, as one of the judges remarked, this does prove that they're out there.

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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.