Six of the Best 923

"Liberal England died a century ago and we still haven’t learned anything," says Stephen Howse. The title made me choke, but it's a good post and the comments are worth reading too.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner for competition, is interviewed about Covid-19 and the role of the big tech companies she distrusts.

"Economists now study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences, Ramseyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine." Anthony Gottlieb on Frank Ramsey, who died at the age of 26.

Rob Young looks back to feature films of the 1960s and 70s, and to documentaries across the decades, and finds that traces of the 'old, weird Britain' can still be unearthed: "To advertise their rural network of acorn-shaped waymarks, the Countryside Commission made a short film depicting the kind of rugged back- packers they hoped to encourage to ramble along Britain’s rural lanes and bridleways. But then the ghosts of a milkmaid and a cloaked minstrel materialise and vanish again on the same footpaths."

Otto Saumarez Smith mourns the loss of Ironbridge's cooling towers.

"Christie’s great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate." John Lanchester accounts for the immortality of Agatha Christie's whodunnits.