Six of the Best 699

"Grenfell Tower should mark a point of no return. No return to the frenzied deregulation, cost-cutting and rampant inequality of the last four decades. These are not new evils. They have been lurking for many years. But it took the light of a burning building for the whole nation to see them." Jonathan Freedland says this disaster must be a turning point.

And Henry Porter says it has become a metaphor for Britain's year from hell.

Alwyn Turner looks at the appeal of revolutionary violence to the ageing Labour left: "When the Tories and their friends in Fleet Street attacked the current Labour leadership for past association with terrorists and enemies of the country, it wasn’t a smear campaign; it was an admittedly lurid but essentially truthful account. It may not have had the impact on the general election that was intended, but the facts remain."

Politics meets neuropsychology as Jerry Useem finds that leaders tend to lose mental capacities - most notably for reading other people - that were essential to their rise.

"The murky water of Dunwich conceals so much: not just porpoises but old merchant houses and graves and churches and even, perhaps most astonishingly of all, an ancient aqueduct." Tom Cox visits Britain's lost city.

Millie Thom on the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln Fair.