Six of the Best 971

Francesca Borri visits the Hyde Park neighbourhood in Leeds, and finds a community abandoned by government and ravaged by deprivation as much as Covid-19.

A Canadian research project gave homeless people $7,500 each. Bridgette Watson finds the results were "beautifully surprising",

"It’s possible that the first MP from what we might consider an ethnic minority background today was elected as early as 1767. James Townshend, Whig MP for West Looe in Cornwall, had a British grandfather who worked for the Royal African Company, a mercantile trading company that also traded enslaved people. His grandmother, a prominent businesswoman who also owned enslaved people, was of African and Dutch descent." Rebecca Lees discovers the first MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Colin Horgan on a study of 'little men' in 1930s Germany that shows how people allow tyranny to spread.

Michael Seely looks back on Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke trilogy.

As a treat for Halloween, David Castleton selects the London Underground's seven most haunted stations. Expect "tales of 'black nuns' with a fondness for harassing banking establishments, screams that still echo from World-War-II air-raids, crypts converted into ticket offices, prehistoric elephants with axes in their heads and attempts to explain why the Underground has acquired such a reputation for being a haven of spooks."