Six of the Best 316

The government should stop dismantling historical gains made in equalities legislation, argues Issan Ghazni.

On Liberator's blog Simon Titley discusses reports that the Liberal Democrats' most generous donor, Rumi Verjee, is to be nominated for a peerage.

Community Land Trusts have helped local people take control of land and develop housing solutions in rural areas across the UK. Now for the first time this model is being used to help tackle London’s dysfunctional housing market, as Kate MacTiernan explains on New Start.

"In the past three years there has been a rapid growth of interest in community shares - a form of finance that allows many small investors to club together to buy community assets. They have been used to buy shops, pubs and other community buildings, to fund green energy projects and even to help supporters buy a football club." David Ainsworth examines an encouraging development for Third Sector.

"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase can be mistaken for a parody Victorian—country houses with secret passages, orphans, evil governesses, railroad-train compartments—but it is a rarer thing than that. It’s never coy or arch (which Aiken said books for children should never be), but it is heard differently by an adult reader, who greets the arrival of common plot turns, descriptive tropes, and matched good-evil characters with pleasure, like old friends showing up suddenly at the door, even as the young reader wants to know only what happens next." John Crowley in the Boston Review says grown ups should read Joan Aiken, not J.K. Bleeding Rowling.

Adrift hunts for the remains of tide mills on the Sussex coast.