Six of the Best 384

"In my heart I want to support HS2; but my head just wont let me. Sure I want a railway service fit for the 21st century. But I need to see the plan that delivers that. I don't think the HS2 plan on its own delivers yet." A View from Ham Common remains unconvinced.

Max Atkinson has been mystified by the locations at which the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer have delivered some rather important recent speeches. George Osborne's latest effort leaves him more mystified still.

On Vice, Simon Childs describes how he was arrested for trying to report on last Saturday's English Defence League rally.

The Silly Mid Off has some advice on writing a cricket blog - much of it applies to any kind of blogging.

We all know Popeye owed his strength to spinach. Brain Pickings shows that the vegetable's supposed properties lie in a mathematical error: "In recording his findings, von Wolf accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook, changing the iron content in spinach by an order of magnitude. While there are actually only 3.5 milligrams of iron in a 100-gram serving of spinach, the accepted fact became 35 milligrams."

Anna Brosnan talks to Bruce Bailey, the man behind the new edition of Pevsner's Northamptonshire, for the Northampton Chronicle & Echo.