Stanley Unwin in The Box of Delights

I probably heard the repeat of it near Christmas in 1968, but it was this BBC Radio adaptation of The Box of Delights from 1966 that introduced me to the book's magic.

And I discovered recently that Stanley Unwin was in it.

Click play on the video above and you will hear a short scene between Abner Brown, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, Rat and Rat's nephew Alf. The nephew is played by Stanley Unwin.

Unwin understood that his act worked best in small doses, which is why he turns up making cameo appearances in all sorts of unexpected places.

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Look out for the Chesham Bois

The old boy pays tribute to the hard work, much of it performed out of sight of members, that ensured our spring conference in my old stamping ground of York was a success.

Wednesday

For many years our hard-working conference stewards received back up from Violent Bonham Carter’s boys. Now that, depending which account you believe, Violent is either lying low after a failed attempt to steal the Crown Jewels or inside a concrete pillar under the Chiswick Flyover, other groups are asked to lend a hand. 

You will recall Tom Brake’s fearsome Carshalton Casuals, while the sisters from Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes always display an attitude that can best be described as “no nonsense”. This year the party has turned to a firm put together by our own Sarah Green, so look out for the Chesham Bois in their distinctive lace-up boots and corduroys.

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

Earlier this week...

• In the corners, nooks and crannies
• “It’s not your aerial, it’s your constitution”

Blur: Blue Jeans

Blur were better than Oasis. Modern Life is Rubbish was better than Parklife.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Shropshire ley line quest: Bronze Age stones to Medieval fortress

Don't believe in ley lines? I'd like to, but I don't either. So let's just enjoy this as Shropshire hill porn.

This is freely adapted from the blurb on YouTube:

On the final part of the quest, we trek six rugged miles from the ancient Mitchell’s Fold stone circle across windswept hills to the mysterious ruins of Simon’s Castle, perched just east of Churchstoke.

Along the way, we follow the straight-line path of a 14-mile ley line that links Caus Castle near Westbury and Simon’s Castle. Expect stunning Shropshire scenery, hidden historical gems, medieval fortress vibes, and plenty of on-the-ground exploration as we close out this multi-part adventure.

Like and subscribe, my pretties. Like and subscribe.

How Harold Godwinson got to the Battle of Hastings and all that

What if historians have got one of the most crucial assumptions about one of England’s most pivotal battles completely wrong?

asked the Guardian the other day. Its report continued:

That’s the claim of one British academic, who argues that the notorious "forced march" of the English army to Stamford Bridge – interpreted for centuries as a sign of Harold’s recklessness and a key factor in his defeat – in fact never happened at all.

What’s more, he believes that as well as their clash on land at Hastings ... Harold also attempted to resist William’s invasion by sea, sending ships to try to trap the Norman fleet in a pincer movement that was ultimately unsuccessful.

The academic is Tom Licence from the University of East Anglia, who presented his evidence at a conference in Oxford today.

His claim has caused controversy in the media, but if nothing else it has given me a good reason to recommend the podcast Gone Medieval. 

Professor Licence is the guest on the latest edition – 1066 New Discovery: The Myth of Harold's March – talking about the research that has led him to question the accepted wisdom.

Whether you are convinced by him or not, you will learn a great deal about the build up to the battle.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars by Alwyn Turner

This review appears in the latest issue of Liberator – no. 434. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

Alwyn Turner

Profile Books, 2026, £25

The most startling thing about Britain in the inter-war years is what didn’t happen. Across Europe, Communist and Fascist regimes took power, but neither force ever came close to it here. George V’s verdict on the General Strike was “That was a rotten way to run a revolution, I could have done it better myself,” but few on the left had revolutionary ambitions and the aims of the unsuccessful strike were modest. Meanwhile on the right, Alwyn Turner argues, Oswald Mosley and his New Party were in decline after 1934: 

After that early boom, the party never really amounted to anything. The momentum rapidly dissipated, and no candidates were fielded in the 1935 general election. It wasn’t entirely clear what the movement was supposed to do, save to provide a dramatic backdrop to Mosley’s speeches, and it failed at that: the thuggery and anti-Semitism ensured that no one paid attention to what its leader was saying.

Other factors Turner points to enhance this impression of stability. The murder rate, for instance, was lower than it had been in Victoria’s day and a tenth of what it was in the United States.

What is particularly enjoyable about Turner’s approach to history is the way he combines high politics with the concerns and the entertainments of the masses. This prevents us from viewing the period as one of unrelenting grimness – think of the absurd view of the Seventies as wholly taken up by strikes and power cuts that pertains on social media and in popular podcasts. 

Sometimes the two streams turn out to be related. The inter-war years saw the decline of music hall and the rise of the cinema and radio. 

Some politicians adapted to these changes better than others. When first invited to address the nation live on BBC radio, both Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald found it natural to opt for a relay of a platform speech at a public meeting; it was Stanley Baldwin, who sat down with a studio microphone and spoke in conversational tones, who was adjudged to be more effective.

Modern readers, familiar with the concept of posttraumatic stress, will not be surprised to learn there was a high male suicide rate after the first world war. And for all the fun Turner brings to light, I remember that my mother used to quote her own mother as saying: “We hadn’t got over the last war when the next one came along.”

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "It’s not your aerial, it’s your constitution"

I have a shrewd suspicion that Lord Bonkers has his eye on the Liberal Democrat presidency himself, but maybe we should be asking his television repair man to stand?

Tuesday

The television repair man arrives. “Chris Mason been on, your lordship?” he asks, assuming I have fired my shotgun at the set again. But I have quite another problem: “Josh Barbarinde’s supporters told us he has an unequalled ability to attract the media and that we should therefore elect him as President of the Liberal Democrats. Yet I can’t remember seeing him on here once. Do you think I need a new aerial?”

“It’s not your aerial, it’s your constitution,” he explains. “When the two Alliance parties merged and it became clear that the first leader was going to be a Liberal, the job of President was invented to give an SDP bigwig an impressive title. What the precise duties of the post are has never been clear, and ambitious young MPs tend to use it to raise their profile in the party with a future leadership bid in mind. Indeed, Josh’s supporters gave the impression that as President he would be a sort of auxiliary leader who would never be out of the media and would decide the party’s campaign strategy. The reality of his Presidency was never going to live up to that.” 

I tip him generously.

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

Earlier this week...

• In the corners, nooks and crannies

Film of the last days of the Leicester & Swannington Railway

The Leicester & Swannington was one of the first railways of the steam age, built to bring coal to Leicester from the mines in the north west of the county.

This amateur film shows the last days of the line from Leicester West Bridge to Desford Junction. The Wikipedia entry for the Leicester & Swannington reckons it closed in 1966, not 1964 as the commentary says. Passenger trains to Leicester West Bridge had ended as early as 1928.

The Joy of Six 1493

"Australian politics is beautifully, exquisitely, delightfully boring. It is boring in the way it used to be back home - sane, predictable, restrained, broadly rational, and consisting mostly of retail offers to voters rather than screeching rhetoric about identity and culture war." Ian Dunt says Australia can teach Britain how to kill populism.

Rose Runswick fears the Liberal Democrats have accidentally voted for a surveillance state: "Let us be clear, the tech lobby wants this ban to happen so they can have more data to push their agendas. We have seen this with Peter Thiel, an American plutocrat who claimed, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and the use of medical data to help create the ICE raids we see now in America."

"She traces the rise in entrepreneurship to changes in working patterns since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when large numbers of people realised their jobs could be done from anywhere with a laptop. Across the UK, coastal towns saw a surge in interest." Zoe Crowther asks if digital nomads can breathe new life into failing resorts.

George Palmer-Soady warns against complacency about the regeneration of Nottingham's Broad Marsh: "Not only would any 12-storey building of its kind block the sunlight from shining over the beautiful Green Heart park, but it would serve as a grim reminder of everything the Broad Marsh had set out not to become."

George Scialabba salutes the moral beauty of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

"A couple of weeks ago I was asked on Times Radio whether I believe in fairies, and I suspect it is a question I will get asked a lot more now that Fairies: A History is published." Francis Young introduces his new book.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: In the corners, nooks and crannies

The new issue of Liberator has dropped – it's issue 434 and you can download if free of charge from the magazine's website.

And that means that it's time to begin another week in the company of Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer. The Guardian report with the “it feels a bit like gruel” comment is to be found here.

Monday

Such was our success at the general election a couple of years ago that not even I can find room for every Liberal Democrat MP these days. So when, as is traditional, the parliamentary party met for a weekend of discussion at the Hall, I was obliged to put some of them up for bed and breakfast in an empty wing of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans. This may explain the report of the event that subsequently appeared in the Guardian where one MP remarked that “it feels a bit like gruel”. You see, it was gruel. 

Perhaps because the rank and file didn’t get much of a breakfast, I heard a good deal of grumbling about the leadership in the corners, nooks and crannies with which the Hall abounds. “We won 72 seats at the last election, but we seem to have stalled since.” “If Ed doesn’t pull his finger out, we could disappear altogether.” “If Davey comes to do a water-based stunt in my constituency, I’ll be tempted to see how much it costs to hire a killer whale by the hour.” 

If I’d fed them on eggs and b. this would never have happened.

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

A report from the expedition to Ed Davey's hinterland

Ed Davey has chosen his favourite books for This Week. I don't know what the precise brief was, but he came up with a list of six novels.

• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
• Waterland by Graham Swift
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Tony Blair would have had a team working on his choices for weeks to make sure he didn't sound too posh or display any biases, but this looks like an honest list for a man of Ed's generation. I've read three of them myself.

Deep joy in Long Buckby at blue plaque for Stanley Unwin

A good news story at last. West Northamptonshire Council has installed a blue plaque outside Stanley Unwin's old bungalow on Long Buckby's High Street, reports BBC News.

Unwin lived there for decades, having worked at at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry during the war along with another hero of the English nonsense tradition. After the war he joined the BBC as a sound recordist, until illness among the cast of a show led him to do his doing his party piece in front of the microphone.

His act involved speaking nonsense in a way that made it sound perfect sense if you weren't listening too closely – or overtroiling your eardroves. You can see him in action in the video above. I did a couple of turns in his style in the last iterations of the Liberal Revue at Lib Dem annual conferences.

Unwin's heyday was the Fifties and Sixties when he appeared on radio, television and in films. After that he was regularly rediscovered by new generations of radio producers and creative directors, and I remember seeing him on Inside Victor Lewis-Smith when he was past eighty.

I've already made one pilgrimage to Long Buckby to photograph the headstone for Unwin and his wife in the village churchyard. I'll have to go back soon to see his blue plaque.

In our Time on the philosophy of Karl Popper

Long ago, I wrote the entry on Karl Popper for Duncan Brack and Malcolm Baines's Dictionary of Liberal Biography.

The BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme on Karl Popper from 2007 makes a good introduction to his thought, both in the philosophy of science and in politics.

In the former he challenged the idea that science involved the accumulation of observations: rather, it involves making bold conjectures and then devising experiments that test their validity.

If I were studying philosophy today I would be interested in the implications of Popper's ideas for our everyday reasoning, rather than for hard science, because I believe we operate in much the same way as scientists. 

Popper suggested this in his collection of papers Objective Knowledge, and he called a later collection All Life is Problem Solving.

Evgeny Lebedev and Ian Botham have lowest Lords attendance, records show

Embed from Getty Images

After making our Headline of the Day Award to the Guardian, the judges added a rider saying the obvious thing to do is to hand Botham's peerage to Mike Brearley.

Le Tigre: Deceptacon

Who are Le Tigre?

Le Tigre (Kathleen Hanna, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman) formed as an obstinately hopeful, even joyous, post-riot grrrl project in New York City in 1999 – when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and regressive hipster irony (à la VICE Magazine) ruled. 

Abandoning traditional punk instrumentation, the band paired drum-machine beats and looped 8-bit samples with the simplest, serrated guitar riffs and call-and-response vocals to write the songs on their first, self-titled album. Released late that year, they conceived of it as music "for the party after the protest."

Deceptacon was the first track on that album. What's it about? There's a whole BBC programme to tell you.

The Joy of Six 1492

"It’s a well-worn tactic: Say something obviously offensive and watch as the media debates whether you were right, actually. The result is that the state of general discourse moves further to the right, the ratchet effect in action." Don't fall into the Nick Timothy trap, warns Mic Wright.

Helen Maguire exposes planners' failure to consider women's safety: "Simple issues like lighting dictate who feels able to use public space after dark. Many women plan their routes based on lighting, avoiding dark shortcuts or taking longer paths home simply to stay on well-lit streets. Some pay for taxis to avoid walking along unlit roads altogether, a luxury that not everyone can afford."

"Quietly, our country is moving, state by state and executive order by executive order, towards policies that all but dismantle the rights of those deemed mentally ill. In the US, both Republican and Democratic legislators have applauded the trend toward seemingly humane policies that lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric commitment and assertive, non-consensual treatment in the community." Nancy Burke on mental health and the assault on autonomy in Trump's America.

Georgina Brewis and Sam Blaxland consider the long history of student finance: "It is hard to see successive campaigns against repayable loans or fee increases as anything other than a series of failures. But it is also clear that many of the support systems students today take for granted arose out of such activism, from student discounts to subsidised canteens to union shops and hardship funds."

Emily Temple tells how J.R.R. Tolkien stopped W.H. Auden writing a book about him.

A run of Japanese films released around the millennium, and bracketed together as 'J-Horror', gave new life to the ghost story. In 2026, says Ray Newman, they’re still exciting.

The last episode of Shoestring: The Dangerous Game

This post is written for the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon on Terence Towles Canote's blog A Shroud of Thoughts. Click on the image above to go to a video of The Dangerous Game.

Shoestring was different. Both the character and the programme were different. A rare BBC show built around a private detective, it ran for two seasons and was screened in 1979 and 1980.

Eddie Shoestring, Radio West’s “private ear”, was a modern hero – so modern that he had suffered a breakdown after working with computers – and his eccentricities immediately cohered to form a believable character. 

I remember my mother complaining that the show was “puerile” and, while I wouldn’t agree with that, there was something boyish about Eddie himself, with his innocence and curiosity. Though he did run into some serious bad hats from time to time, he was to an extent living out a fantasy of being a private detective amid the benign home of a Bristol local radio station.

Two Shoestring novelisations were published around the time the show was screened. In one of them he was warned off a case because “this is a businessman’s city,” and as a young councillor later in the Eighties I identified with him. No one was going to ask me to join the golf club or the Freemasons.

Enter Trevor Eve

Trevor Eve, who played Eddie, was little known when he was cast in the lead of this new BBC show. He had come to notice playing Paul McCartney in Willy Russell’s play John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, which opened at the Liverpool Everyman and later transferred to London’s West End. 

Robert Banks Stewart says in the BBC documentary The Cult of Shoestring that he had seen Eve directed by Laurence Olivier in a Granada TV production of Hindle Wakes and been immensely impressed by him. He championed Eve against the better-known actors who were being considered for the role of Shoestring and got his way.

Helped by an intermittent ITV strike, the early episodes of Shoestring won audiences of up to 21 million in its Sunday evening slot – a figure that is unthinkable for any British show now in our multi-channel world – making Eve a star.

Essentially playing himself

The regular supporting cast was Doran Godwin as Shoestring’s long-suffering landlady and occasional love, Liz Crowther as Radio West’s receptionist and Michael Medwin as the station’s boss.

Doran Godwin was a more experienced stage and television actress than Eve whose credits included the lead role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma 1972. Liz Crowther is the daughter of the popular comedian and television host Leslie Crowther, who as a child played Lucy in a 1967 BBC adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She had returned to acting a year or two before she was cast in Shoestring and is still working today.

I wrote about Michael Medwin’s childhood and acting career when I covered The Intruder for Terence Towles Canote's 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. By the time Shoestring was made, he had long been concentrating on the business side of the film and theatre business, and with notable success. 

So when Medwin played the smooth station boss Don Satchley, who was always fretting about how much Eddie’s investigations were going to cost Radio West, he was essentially playing himself.

All sorts of interesting actors turned up in the series. Harry H. Corbett, playing one of the nastier villains Eddie encountered, shook off years of Harold Steptoe to remind you he had once been Joan Littlewood’s star Shakespearian at Stratford East. Kevin Whatley made his first screen appearance as a professional footballer, and Daniel Day Lewis his first adult screen appearance as a DJ.

Trevor Eve after Shoestring

Shoestring came to an end after two series because Trevor Eve wanted to move on with his career and feared he might become known for only this one role. He soon found success on the stage, winning an Olivier Award for his performance in Children of a Lesser God, and has appeared in films, but has remained best known for his work on television. 

He played the equally unconventional much angrier Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, head of a police unit that investigates cold cases, in Waking the Dead, for nine series between 2000 and 2011, totalling 92 episodes. 

He is now seen, like John Thaw and James Bolam, as a first-rate actor who has made his greatest contribution on the small screen.

The last edition of Shoestring ever made

The episode I have chosen is episode 10 of its second series, The Dangerous Game, which was the last edition of Shoestring ever made – it may be because the series finished so soon that it is fondly remembered. It certainly went out on a high with this one, which displays both Eddie Shoestring in knight in shining armour mode and the series’ sense of humour. He quizzes a department store buyer who turns out to be acting as Santa (“One of the perks of the job. Market research, if you like. I do it every Christmas.”), only to find he is a big Eddie Shoestring and Radio West fan.

A nurse talks to Eddie about a boy who has been admitted to hospital with burns and an eye injury – she is concerned that he and his father are not telling the truth about how he was hurt. After making himself a thorough nuisance to the father, the father admits that his son was injured when the transformer of an electric game he had bought him (the boy’s birthday s a couple of days before Christmas) blew up in his face. Eddie is then faced with the task of tracking down all the games that have been sold before they are opened as presents on Christmas morning.

We see him haunting the shops and markets of Bristol as seasonal music spills from every radio and even the Salvation Army band. This diegetic music makes the show feel absurdly Christmassy, and the city was always part of the show’s attraction, notably here in Eddie’s last-minute dash over the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the small hours of Christmas morning to retrieve the one dangerous game he has not yet located.

Son of British film royalty

The supporting cast in The Dangerous Game is impressive. The importer of the toy, who turns out not to be the villain we imagined, is played by Bert Kwouk, who was the go-to Chinese actor in British films and television for decades – he was in everything from Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Deep End to Last of the Summer Wine via the Pink Panther films.

The injured boy’s parents are Michael Elphick and Celia Imrie – the former a big name in British television and the latter about to become one, as well as enjoying great success on stage and in films to this day. And the boy himself is played by Tom Bolt who, as I discovered while writing this, is the son of British film royalty. His mother is the Oscar-nominated actress Sarah Miles and his father the double Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Bolt.

Tom's casting may have been aided by the fact that the director of The Dangerous Game is his half-brother Ben Bolt, but he is good in the role.

The Duke of Wellington's daughter

Writing this has reminded me just how much I enjoyed Shoestring and how much fun it was. I have linked to a video of The Dangerous Game at the top of this post – just click on the image. (I’m sorry about all the advertisements.) If it disappears from the web because of some nonsense about “copyright”, I shall replace it with the documentary The Cult of Shoestring, which is well worth a watch anyway. 

If nothing else, you will learn how the Duke of Wellington’s daughter played the key role in persuading the BBC to broadcast the show in the plum Sunday evening slot.

The team behind Shoestring went on to make Bergerac, an equally successful police detective series set on the Channel Island of Jersey. But we leave Eddie Shoestring asleep among the ruins of a Christmas party that he has missed while saving children from injury. 

The streets of Bristol were only intermittently mean, and perhaps Eddie was a little tarnished by experience and sometimes afraid, but he was far from mean and people loved him. 

Dog solves murder: Labrador cracks 160-year-old case when he digs up bottle of Victorian poison in the garden

Photo by Grant Durr from Unsplash

The judges bid you unclutch your pearls, because the Mail receives today's Headline of the Day Award.

They also say this story reminds them of that time the head of the victim on a notorious 19th-century murder was found in David Attenborough's garden.

The Joy of Six 1491

Mariano delli Santi is concerned by the Information Commissioner's Office and its enthusiasm for age-verification: "The ICO are actively encouraging platforms to adopt more invasive verification technologies, at a time when privacy violations and malpractice are starting to emerge within the industry. Further, the ICO characterisation of age assurance technology as 'advanced' and 'readily available' comes as hundreds of computer scientists call for a moratorium on the roll out of this technology and warn about the technical limitations and infeasibility of this approach."

"The parental rights movement frames the conflict as parental rights versus government control, completely disregarding children's rights, but the actual constitutional balance has never been between parents and the state alone. It is more of a triangular structure in which the child is a distinct rights-bearing person, the parent exercises authority in trust, and the state acts as a backstop when that trust is fundamentally breached." Steve Kennedy examines the American right's enthusiasm for parents' rights.

Brian McHugh welcomes the growth of repair café culture in the UK.

Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri pays tribute to Jürgen Habermas by highlighting his study of the coffee houses of Georgian London.

"Watkins' film has only gained in relevance, with the US once again caught in endless foreign conflict, the undermining of civilian freedoms by the Patriot Act, the untold horrors of US detention compounds in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, and an Administration exploiting the politics of polarisation to its own ends ('You're either with us, or you're against us') in a land where domestic 'Culture Wars' continue to reflect bloodier struggles abroad." This article by rantbit on Peter Watkins' film Punishment Park was written 10 years ago, but it and the film sound even more relevant today.

"Craven House, a fledgling novel by ... Hamilton, fits right into this groove, set as it is in a West London boarding house during the early part of the 20th century. While Craven isn’t as polished as Hamilton’s later work – he was only twenty-two when the book was first published in 1926 – there is still much to enjoy here, particularly in the use of the setting as a vehicle for fiction." Jacquiwine looks at Craven House by Patrick Hamilton.

The Somerset & Dorset Railway branch to Burnham-on-Sea

The YouTube blurb for this video says:

The Friendly Line to Burnham was one of a series of delightful programmes in 1980 under the general title of The Seaside Trains. The Somerset & Dorset Burnham branch, which was a casualty of Beeching, typifies many such lines throughout the country. Today, part of the old trackbed across the Somerset Levels is a cycleway and footpath, whilst other sections have more or less vanished from the map completely. 

A feature of this little line was the number of level crossings, some 14 in total, some of which were manned by (chiefly lady) crossing keepers living in an adjacent little properties, some so far out on a limb that they were dependant on the railway to bring in their water supplies.

The branch ran from Highbridge to Burnham-on-Sea. It was closed to regular passenger services, long before the Beeching Report, on 28 October 1951. Excursion traffic continued until 1962 and the goods depot remained open until 1963.

Landspeed record celebration hit by parking tickets

As so often these days, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges you thought you would enjoy this from the story below:

Southport Liberal Democrats said the parking tickets were an embarrassment to Sefton Council and claimed many tickets have now been rescinded after protests. 

The council and the office of the High Sheriff of Merseyside have been contacted for comment. 

Posting on Facebook the Lib Dems also criticised the council for charging the organisers for opening the public toilets and for refreshments provided for the mayor and High Sheriff's party.

On Liberty: New edition gives Harriet Taylor her due

An edition of On Liberty published this month is the first to name Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author alongside John Stuart Mill, reports the philosophy news site Daily Nous.

John Stuart Mill acknowledged Harriet Taylor's part in the writing of the work in his Autobiography:

With regard to the thoughts [expressed in the book], it is difficult to identify any particular part or element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us both.

Yet On Liberty has only ever appeared with just the one name on its cover.

Daily Nous says there is objective evidence that On Liberty is the work of two hands:

In a 2022 article in Utilitas (on which part of the introduction to the new On Liberty is based), Schmidt-Petri, Schefczyk, and Osburg lay out one reason: "stylometric analyses" provide some strong (though not on their own decisive) evidence to “say with some degree of confidence that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM played a part in putting parts of the text into words.” 

And what are stylometric analyses? "Stylometry extracts the writing style of a person from his or her texts and then compares this 'stylome' to the stylome of texts the author of which is yet to be identified."

But you don't need stylometry to tell you that On Liberty is not typical of John Stuart Mill's writings. It sets out to "assert one very simple principle", whereas Mill is usually well aware of the complexity that attends weighty questions. 

So his book Considerations on Representative Government, while supporting parliamentary democracy, hedges the principle around with all sorts of checks and safeguards in an attempt to ensure that parliament will act in the national interest rather than in the interests of a simple majority of the electorate.

Daily Nous also mentions Misha Glenny's first outing as presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, which dealt with On Liberty. 

Harriet Taylor's contribution is discussed there too and, having had occasion to read On Liberty again recently, I concur with the comment that, who every wrote it, the text could have done with a good edit before it was published.

Oh, those Russians: Antony Beevor on Rasputin and the Romanovs

The British military historian Sir Antony Beevor is busy promoting his new book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs. Here he in the guest on Jackson van Uden's History with Jackson podcast.

Not only did I love Sylvia by Focus when I was 12, I could name all the Romanov tsars in their correct order. I had developed a fascination with Russian history after reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie.

Sadly, that knowledge has been lost over the years, along with reams of chess opening theory and the ability to construct proofs in formal logic.

The Joy of Six 1490

"Our reviewers found that the guests or 'experts' are predominantly drawn from a pool of right wing commentators, politicians, polling organisations, or think tanks. The supposedly counterbalancing minority voices often have little real stature or expertise and are challenged or interrupted much more than the guests who agree with the presenter’s views." Alan Rusbridger introduces The New World's special investigation of GB News and of Ofcom's abdication of its role.

Thomas Worth sets out the threat the invigorated Greens pose to Liberal Democrat ambitions: "While it isn’t likely the Greens will take seats from us, it is possible they will prevent us from making gains by splitting our vote and allowing Reform or a wounded Conservative Party to slip through the middle. In Sussex, signs of this happening were occurring even before Zack Polanski took over the Greens."

Annabel Hoare argues that Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere opted for superficial spectacle over serious scrutiny.

"British children are not getting shorter, despite claims to the contrary. In fact, they are getting taller. But this is not good news. When my colleagues and I analysed national data on child height, we found that the trend is largely explained by rising childhood obesity and widening inequalities." Andrew Moscrop shares his research.

"Pym’s comic novels, on the surface, are simple, sometimes even silly, stories about sisters, village life, petty church and office politics, and the quiet lives of maiden aunts. But underneath, these are novels about love, loneliness, and longing; social connections, or lack thereof, plus that curiosity about others which is fuel for gossip; and the precarity of an unmarried woman’s place in society." Kerry Clare on the importance of Barbara Pym.

Philip Wilkinson discovers an "Edwardian baroque monster, which housed police, ambulance, and fire stations, together with a coroner’s court, for much of the 20th century," in Manchester's London Road.

London bars shun Margot Robbie’s gin over shellfish allergen concerns

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our Headline of the Day. Well done to everyone at the Guardian.

Focus: Sylvia

Sylvia was that rare thing, a European hit in the UK in 1973. Despite being an instrumental, it got as high as no. 4 in the singles chart.

And Focus's guitarist Jan Akkerman finished near the top in music papers' polls for the best guitarist for a good while afterwards.

Me? I loved this record when I was 12.

There's magnolia, that's for remembrance

It's almost four years since my mother died. A strong memory from her last days is the magnolia at the end of the street. I saw it every time I went out on an errand.

As it was so sunny today, I went to see if the tree is still thriving. And it is.

T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for Faber & Faber

Stefan Collini has reviewed the latest volume of T.S. Eliot's letters for the London Review of Books. It covers the years 1942-4, and the most striking thing about the review is the revelation of how little time Eliot spent writing poetry and how much he devoted to his duties for the publishers Faber & Faber.

One advantage that firm had over other publishers was that it was based in Russel Square rather than the traditional book-trade quarter of Pasternoster Row, which stood in the shadow of St Paul's and was heavily bombed in the London Blitz.

Collini also writes about Eliot's most famous business decision: his rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm:

In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. 

Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot "see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for", but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript "have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time". 

Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book "was a great mistake on our part". Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. 

The rejection letter suggests that the book's "positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing", but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. 

With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted. 

Collini, incidentally, quotes some of Eliot's verdicts on his contemporaries – Orwell is "a very queer bird".

Now Ed Davey is implying that Nigel Farage is right

Early last week I sent off my latest piece for Central Bylines. In it I praised Ed Davey's willingness to challenge the right's claims to patriotism:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

By the time it appeared, Ed Davey had issued this video.

Winston Churchill helped defeat fascism in Europe. He deserves better than being replaced by a badger 🦡

[image or embed]

— Ed Davey (@eddavey.libdems.org.uk) 11 March 2026 at 17:30

Far from challenging the right, this as good as admits they are correct. Yes, it implies, the country is run by an elite of woke politicians who hold everything we Britons love in contempt.

Ed even starts with "Now they're going to take Winston Churchill of our fivers...", which is a journalistic tactic designed to give the impression that the isolated incident you are writing about is in fact only the latest in a long catalogue of outrages. A hard-right commentator could have used exactly the same angle.

In this video, the Liberal Democrats are adopting Labour's failed strategy of telling people "Reform are right about everything but you mustn't vote for them."

I sometimes fear that some of Ed's advisers are a little too online. Remember when they wrote a tweet for him expressing his shock at the shooting of Charlie Kirk? Had Ed even heard of him?

Anyway, let me end with a photograph caption from James Hawes's new The Shortest History of Ireland that's relevant to those advisers' choice of music:

The past is a strange country: Howth gun-runners Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers aboard the yacht Asgard. From Limerick and Boston respectively, they – and Molly's novelist husband Erskine – were radical Irish Nationalists from the WASP elite: Mary's first cousin Cecil, author of the imperial touch-song I Vow to Thee My Country, was right then Britain's ambassador to the United States.

When John Smith's Magnet Ales were advertised across York

When I was a student in York the corner shops in the backstreets all had advertising John Smith's Magnet Ales.

The shops have mostly closed and, while the name Magnet still survives, the beer is no longer brewed at John Smith's Tadcaster brewery but produced under licence by Cameron's in Hartlepool.

I did find a couple of relics of Magnet advertising when I went hunting for the blue plaque on Frankie Howerd's childhood home in York.

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The Joy of Six 1489

Searchlight has the measure of Reform UK's leader: "It’s a script Nigel Farage knows well. Candidates or causes closely linked to him, perhaps even bearing his name and his photograph, make large, attention-grabbing promises. Votes are won on the strength of them. Then, once the votes are counted the promises are declared – with an air of wounded innocence – to have never been made, and certainly not by him."

AI fakes spread disinformation but, asks Anna Merlan, is the distrust they create even worse?

"Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. 'We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.'" Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed the Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners.

Patrick Wadden argues that Medieval Irish people saw themselves as Europeans, not Celts: "The Irish language and people were only labelled as Celtic for the first time in the 18th century. In the rich and varied textual sources that have survived from early Ireland, including annals, saints' lives, laws, and sagas about great heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhail, the words 'Celt' and 'Celtic' do not appear even once."

"In the case of Peter Grimes, Forster suggests, something is lost. Rather than Grimes as a lugubrious murderer, in Britten’s opera the blame is rather sanctimoniously placed on the townsfolk for misunderstanding him, turning the whole thing into social criticism, which was far from Crabbe’s original. It takes away from the strangeness and mystery of the character of Grimes, from his psychological complexity, but also from the ‘horizontality and mud’ that shape the feeling of the poem and the world it describes." John-Paul Stonnard finds that E.M. Forster did not appreciate the version of George Crabbe's character Peter Grimes presented by Montague Slater, who wrote the libretto for Britten's opera.

Helen Pickles rightly suggests Ripon, Yorkshire's smallest city, as a tourist destination.