Mysterious blue glow traced to Flying Banana

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award with this tale of mysterious Lincolnshire:

Is it a UFO? Is it the Northern Lights? No, it's the "Flying Banana".

A blue glow that has lit up Lincolnshire's night sky in recent weeks has been traced to an unlikely source: a bright yellow train.

Network Rail said the mysterious light comes from its new measurement train – nicknamed the Flying Banana – which looks for faults on the line for engineers to repair.

The company said on hazy nights, equipment from the yellow train can create a blue glow "that looks like something from the X-Files" as it tests overhead lines.

My photo shows the Flying Banana at Leicester station some years ago.

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Richard Reich argues that employers will not share the gains from AI unless they are made to: "If the five-day workweek with five days of pay shrinks to four days with four days of pay, and then to three, and to two, and perhaps one, AI will supplant most people’s work and drive down our take-home pay. We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them."

"In opposing these children’s homes, neighbours resort to language about children in care that they would not use for other groups of people, such as same-sex couples or people who are not white. Children in care are trouble makers, they complain; they bring down house prices, they are not from our community, they make too much noise." Martin Borrow asks why proposals to open new homes, which often for only two or three children, are met with such hostility.

"This part of south-west England, much of which is currently under water, used to be known as the 'land of the summer people'. Historically, frequent flooding was the main reason for purely seasonal occupation in this area bordered by the Bristol Channel and the Mendip, Quantock and Blackdown Hills." Jess Neumann sets out the threat that climate change poses to Somerset.

Lottie Wood explores gender fluidity, rural landscapes and the Women’s Land Army, introducing us to E.M. Barraud's memoir Set My Hand Upon the Plough.

"It is deeply troubling that the drive of Brontë’s Isabella, a survivor of domestic abuse, has been reread to dramatically absolve her abuser. The girl sobbing behind me as the credits rolled attests to the success of this exoneration. Really, she should be crying over the scripting of violent abuse as consensual play." Anna Drury is concerned by Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

Richard Elliott celebrates a new box set that brings together live and studio recordings of the Scottish folk singer, guitarist and songwriter Dick Gaughan.

Christopher Frayling on the making of The Innocents (1961)

The Innocents, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw, is a wonderful film, and this documentary is worthy of it.

You don't see many of them here, but it's rightly been said that even monochrome behind-the scenes photographs of The Innocents are terrifying.

Ponden Hall: Sitting round a hearth with the Brontë sisters

Ponden Hall, which can be found below the village of Stanbury near Haworth, has been suggested as one of the inspirations for Thrushcross Grange in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and also for her sister Anne's Wildfell Hall.

What is certain is that the Brontës knew the Heatons, the family who owned Ponden Hall, and would visit them to make use of their extensive library. And, as everyone is talking about Wuthering Heights, I have been thinking about the place.

Ponden Hall was put up for sale in 2020, so you can see the interior in a Country Life article from that year. When I knew it – I had short breaks there twice in the 1990s – it had a more bohemian vibe, but I still recognise the place. I remember the stone-flagged floors in particular.

The first time I stayed was with a couple of colleagues from work, and I think it was in a pub in Haworth that I learnt to drink gin and tonic. My memories of the event are necessarily a little hazy, but I do recall that we walked to Wycoller and back by the reservoirs the next day, so I can't have been too bad. I also remember visiting Bingley Five Rise and seeing birds nesting in the lock gates.

My second visit to Ponden Hall was with some people from Leicester Friends of the Earth. I was never a member, but I was a sort of Friend of Friends of the Earth. Also staying that time were an American and his wife, and he turned out to be an expert on the Brontës.

As we sat in front of the open fire, he told us about the sisters using the library here, and then added: "They probably sat round this very hearth." We all shivered violently.

Queen: Killer Queen

I really liked Queen when they first appeared. They were inventive, clever, witty... Everything that Mud, Sweet and most of the singles chart in 1974 weren't. Killer Queen is a good example of them in this period.

Then came global stardom and stadium rock, which is rarely inventive, clever and witty. Laibach's satirical reworking of One Vision as a Nazi anthem tells us something important about the genre.

Maybe I was just the right age for early Queen. Bohemian Rhapsody has never sounded as impressive as it did when I first heard it, aged 15, just as I liked Seven Seas of Rhye because I was 14.

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"In a sense, Clegg is right: politicians are more focused on narratives than data. But it’s data they use to justify their policies these days. Indeed, far from modern politics being a vibrant competition of ideas in the way Clegg suggests, modern anglophone politics has been dominated by just one since the 1980s: There Is No Alternative." James Graham takes apart Nick Clegg's book How to Save the Internet.

Sam Bright is puzzled by the contradictions of right-wing journalists: "These journalists are neoliberals – they preach the free market gospel. You can’t get them to shut up about the Industrial Revolution and how deregulated enterprise supposedly birthed Britain as an economic superpower. And yet they’re stuck in the Middle Ages – terrified of the advances in science and engineering that also spawned from their favourite period of history."

"Trade unions are civil society organisations. They give working people a way to voice their concerns, secure representation, and exercise lawful leverage. In a country where bargaining is often fragmented and workplace voice is weak, that is not a threat to liberalism; it is a condition of it." Jack Meredith states the Liberal case for the government's Employment Rights Act,

Tracey Spensley on veterinary medicines and the decline of Britain's songbirds.

Darren Chetty looks at the current BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies: "The decision to include a diverse cast, including the excellent Winston Sawyers who plays Ralph, will probably be viewed by many as a progressive move, ensuring that not only white actors are offered roles and not only white people are represented on screen. But for all its progressive aspirations, an adaptation like this obscures some of the most interesting themes discernible in the book."

"Barrie was always ageless, with a kind of supernatural vibe about him that makes me think perhaps he wasn’t quite of this world. And in a way, he wasn’t: he belonged to a London long vanished, full of glamour and promise. Did Barrie disappear along with it?" Melissa Blaise searches for a Chelsea socialite she once knew.

Lion & Unicorn: Children, bombsites and Innocent Sinners (1958)

Thanks to Lion and Unicorn for publishing a piece from me on British films about children and bombsites, and on the film Innocent Sinners (1958) in particular:

So dangerous did bombsites become for boy actors that Jon Whiteley ventured on to them twice and got caught up with a murderer both times. In Hunted (1952) he comes across Dirk Bogarde dumping the body of his wife’s lover, while in The Weapon (1956) he finds a gun, accidentally shoots a playmate and, thinking he has killed him, goes on the run. In reality, it’s not the police Whiteley needs to worry about but a villainous George Cole, who used the gun to kill some years before and now fears detection.

The radical instability of The Once and Future King

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

This is the final episode of Series Two, and our guest Elizabeth Elliott is helping us explore Camelot in The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Published in 1958, The Once and Future King adapts the famous stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. 

Beginning with the childhood of Arthur in the first book, The Sword in the Stone, White’s version of the familiar stories are complex examinations of leadership, nobility, romance and war. Of White’s novel, Burgess writes, "This is not remote and fabulous history: the lesson of the breaking of the Round Table is for our time."

So says the YouTube blurb for this video.

I love T.H. White's writing, but The Once and Future King is what literary theorists call an unstable text. We can't even agree how many books there are in the sequence. Is it four, or should The Book of Merlyn, which wasn't published until 13 years after White's death, be included to make it five? Is it for adults of children? The first book, The Sword in the Stone, is surely written for children and shows White's love of John Masefield, but the later books seem far more adult in their tone and themes.

And then there is his rewriting of the first two books. I'm far more familiar with the original versions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. Maybe we all construct our own personal versions of The Once and Future King?

Anyway, this is a good discussion of The Once and Future King and some of these issues.

Boudicca the three-legged beaver is rewilding Rushden Lakes

Talk about burying the lede. BBC News has a story about Alan and Boudicca, the beavers at Rushden Lakes – they've featured here before – and late on it drops this in:

Alan was named after Alan Carr, who grew up in the county, and Boudica after the warrior, as it is believed she lost her leg in a fight.

Boudicca has three legs? That makes these achievements even more remarkable:

In February 2025, eight beavers were released into Delta Pit lake, part of Rushden Lakes, Northamptonshire – the first time the rodent had been reintroduced to the county in 400 years.

The Wildlife Trust for Beds, Cambs and Northants said parents, Boudica and Alan, had welcomed two new kits in September, had felled three large trees, coppiced 30 more, and built three lodges.

Project officer Ben Casey said the beavers had made "a big difference" in changing the structure of the site to improve the habitat for a range of species.

You can see Boudicca, Alan and their two latest kits in the video above.

Mayor of Desborough called opponent a "prick" and a "sad wanker"

It's all kicking off in Desborough. The excellent NN Journal reports a walk out at last night's meeting of the town council after the mayor refused to stand down:

Last month Desborough Town councillor and North Northamptonshire councillor Bill McElhinney quit the Conservative Party after sending a message to a resident calling fellow town councillor Labour’s Andy Coleman a "prick" and a "sad wanker".

Cllr Coleman has put in a standards complaint about Cllr McElhinney, which is being looked at by NNC’s legal officer, and last night he boycotted the town council meeting along with Liberal Democrat Alan Window. [Hello Alan!]

Cllr Coleman’s three Labour colleagues attended the meeting, but after Cllr Tim Healy’s request for Cllr McElhinney to stand down was refused, the trio quit the meeting.

NN Journal reports McElhinney as saying that he regrets the comments and as complaining that the Labour group "are making as much of it as they possibly can".

He says he has put in a counter complaint about Cllr Coleman. whom he accuses of double standards in the light of his own comments about public figures on social media.

Cllr Coleman's complaint is being investigated by the legal office of North Northamptonshire Council, of which Cllr McElhinney is also a member. I'm not aware that whataboutery is a defence under the act.

Former Reform cabinet member in Leicestershire joins Restore

Leicestershire County Council's minority Reform UK administration has lost a councillor and former cabinet member, reports the Leicester Mercury. Charles Whitford, the member for Markfield, Desford and Thornton, has joined Restore Britain.

I last blogged about Whitford when he lost his cabinet position over emails he sent to residents. I quoted the Mercury

In the emails ... Cllr Whitford claimed the people raising the flags were doing so to "reject" the "destruction of British values" amid an alleged "influx of soon to be millions of mainly Muslim men of fighting age". One recipient described the councillor's response as "flat out Islamophobic". ... 

Cllr Whitford also claimed that immigrants were coming to make the UK a "Muslim state", leading to one of the residents accusing him of "whipping up hatred" with his words.

There's been a trickle of Reform councillors joining Restore this week, and if Whitford is in any way typical of them, Reform will be more credible for their leaving, even if Restore does siphon of some their voters too.

Despite the publicity we give to every councillor who leaves Reform – some of them, it has to be admitted for entertaining reasons – it should be remembered that they now have more councillors than they did after last May's local elections. As well as regularly winning by-elections, they are the big net gainers from defections – see Augustus Carp's latest round up for details.

Later. Now comes news that a Reform councillor has resigned from the county council altogether. It's Andrew Thorp, who represents Narborough and Whetstone.

Andrew Lownie on today's arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Andrew Lownie, the indefatigable author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, responds to today's developments.

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Martin Parr looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to depose a prime minister: "Labour, significantly, has never toppled a prime minister. It’s not in the culture of so cooperativist a party: there’s no equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And whenever it might have happened, the challenger blinked: Herbert Morrison with Attlee; Roy Jenkins with Wilson; David Miliband with Brown; Wes Streeting may have just joined the roster of the rueful."

Sumaiya Motara on the brutal contest for low-paid work: "It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage."

"The case took a dramatic turn in November when Erin’s teenage son ... ran away from his father’s home and hired his own solicitor. After a period in foster care and a series of urgent hearings, he was later reunited with his mother for their first Christmas together in six years." Hannah Summers reports on a hearing that highlights the issue of unregulated psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses.

Some major news organisations are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They are doing so largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using it as a back door for large-scale scraping. Mark Graham argues that these concerns, though understandable, are unfounded.

"Whilst Landlord continues to power its way across the country ... it has to be hoped that the company doesn't forget its roots and the locality that sustained it for much of its existence." Real Ale, Real Music visits Keighley, home of the brewer Timothy Taylor.

Robert Hugill praises the new Opera North production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

The effect on children when a parent loses a parliamentary election

Matthew Spender's book A House in St John's Wood is a portrait of his father, the poet Stephen Spender.

Stephen's father was Harold Spender and the Michael mentioned below is Stephen's brother Michael Spender. The third brother was Humphrey Spender – they were very much a family of Wikipedia entries.

Early in his book, Matthew Spender writes:

When Stephen was twelve, Harold stood as a Liberal candidate in a general election. My father remembered being hauled around Bath in a pony-carriage with his two brothers, each with a placard round his neck saying "Vote for Daddy". Harold lost and the effect on Michael and Stephen was traumatic.

Michael said: "When they are very young, the children of a public man worship their father for being famous – a kind of god: but it's extraordinary how soon they get to realise if he's a public failure." Michael developed a stammer. He decided that his father was "inefficient", which in eyes was the worst thing a man could be. 

Stephen, instead, just couldn't stop crying. It confirmed his suspicion that his father was a windbag whose exhortations of "on and ever on" were meaningless.

Spencer Davis Group: Every Little Bit Hurts

Recorded at the Marquee Club in February 1965, so Steve Winwood (on vocals and piano) is 16 here.

Lloyd George’s oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall

Embed from Getty Images

In 1992 the journalist Edward Pearce published a diary of that year's general election campaign. It was reviewed for the London Review of Books by Peter Clarke.

Here is Clarke on Lloyd George:

Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. 

As A.J.P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George's platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – "five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed" – was fit to bring the house down. 

He was the politician as entertainer, subordinating reason to emotion as much as any party political broadcast in the last campaign. He could pirouette, like Chaplin, from the broadest belly-laugh to tear-jerking pathos without having to say: "but to be serious for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ..." 

Yet, as the last of the great pre-electronic politicians, Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless. 

His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class constituency, and showed that the public meeting, in its classic form, was doomed. Baldwin could be relied upon to rise to the small occasion.

Failed teeth op woman admits drug driving

This tale of everyday life in Telford wins BBC News our Headline of the Day Award.

Golders Green: A milestone in the history of the tube and suburbia

Jago Hazzard sets out the history of Golders Green station, and tells us about the history of the London Underground and of London suburbia in the process.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not subscribe to his YouTube channel?

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Chris Dillow argues that if government wants to foster economic growth, it will have to fight for it: "Right now, the social transformation needed to raise growth requires the government to face down the powerful interests of, if not capital in general, then at least the more regressive elements of it such as rentiers, monopolists and media barons."

Virginia Heffernan investigates Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon, Edge. She finds that it infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science.

"'Free School Meals' and 'Free School Clothing' were an absolute lifeline for us ... That support meant I could walk through the school gates looking like everyone else, focusing on my education rather than the clothes on my back. It taught me that while education is a right, the cost of accessing it can be a barrier we must actively dismantle." Shaffaq Mohammed on the importance of the Lib Dem amendment, passed by the Lords, that will put a price cap on school uniforms.

Lauren Leek crunches the numbers to see why so many pubs have closed: "So here’s the political economy of pub closures. It is not: people stopped going. It is: pubs became collateral in leveraged buyouts, debt costs were passed down as higher rents and lower investment, and the pubs that couldn’t sustain the extraction closed, while the ones that could were reshaped into higher-margin branded concepts serving a wealthier clientele."

Did climate change lead to greater persecution of witches? York Historian weighs the evidence.

"Whenever a performer had a Muppet on their hand, they never broke character. So all the time in between takes, Gonzo would still be Gonzo and I was still talking to Gonzo, not Dave Goelz, who is the performer of Gonzo. I believed that Gonzo and Rizzo were my friends, and we were on an adventure together. Rizzo in particular, Steve Whitmire, was so funny. We would just play all day long." Kevin Bishop shares his memories of playing Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island with Brian VanHooker.

The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

See Charles Hawtrey and Joan Hickson staffing St Pancras in 1955

So I watched Simon and Laura, and found that, despite the presence of Ian Carmichael, who I always struggle with, it justifies the enthusiasm of that British Film Institute video I posted the other day.

But there is one scene that brought unexpected pleasure – click play above to watch it.

Peter Finch (Simon) has left his wife and is on his way back to Leicester. His agent (played by Hubert Gregg) catches up with him at St Pancras with news of the offer for the couple to star in the new BBC series.

It really is St Pancras, right down to the lovely maroon British Railways Midland Region enamel signs. 

A train to Bradford is announced, and one of the stations it calls at is Trent. (You can also hear Trent in a St Pancras announcement in the Kenneth More film The Comedy Man.)

Better still, the porter who takes Finch's luggage on to and then off the platform is Charles Hawtrey – this may well be the first time he has worked for the railways since A Canterbury Tale.

And the refreshment counter is in the charge of Joan Hickson. Enjoy.

In which William James uses a ladder to spy on G.K. Chesterton

In 1907 the American philosopher William James was invited to deliver a series of lectures to Manchester College in Oxford. (It was not then part of the University of Oxford: it educated Nonconformist students, who were barred by the university.)

After delivering the lectures, he went to stay with his brother, the novelist Henry James, in Rye. Seamus Perry, in the London Review of Books, tells what he got up to there:

He was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely "gurgled and giggled", he apparently came across as "lovable".

Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a "tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes"; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton's exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called "modern intellectualism".

Tyler Ballgame: For the First Time, Again

The Guardian introduces us to Tyler Ballgame – this is the title track from his first album, which was released last month:

"Not long after his first trip to London, a video of him performing live at a Los Angeles bar called the Fable began circulating online. By the time he came back to the UK to perform at Brighton industry showcase the Great Escape, he had signed to Rough Trade. Critical hosannas began raining down on Ballgame: he has variously been compared to Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley."

And there's more:

He also turned out to be catnip for what’s left of the music press, an interviewee with a penchant for the hippy-friendly philosophy of Alan Watts and an intriguing backstory. A Berklee College of Music dropout who spent years sequestered in his parents’ basement, struggling with depression and a gargantuan appetite for marijuana, he underwent a “spiritual awakening” thanks to the work of German self-help guru Eckhart Tolle – also beloved of Kendrick Lamar – and the intervention of a dietician and counsellor called Courtney Huard, who was subsequently murdered by her husband.

Who are all these people?

Moreover, he announced, Tyler Ballgame wasn’t just a stage name, it was a persona the former Tyler Perry had invented, drawing on his background in drama: playing the part of an “idealised frontman from the 60s and 70s” gave him “the licence to show more” of himself.

As to his music, Ballgame has been compared to a lot of other singers – Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley. You can hear some of those influences here.

He's hardly the first artist to be derivative, but would it be a huge surprise if Ballgame turned out to have been generated by AI?

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Degenerate Art on Donald Trump's concentration camps and what can be done to resist their building: "When you consider the number – again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history – the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labour camps in the People’s Republic of China."

"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.

Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."

"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.

Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.