Six of the Best 975

All too often, says Aliya Rao, jobseekers are told that unemployment is their own fault.

"We don’t allow companies to make a profit out of children by running schools, so why do we allow it in the 24-hour care of vulnerable children? One justification would be if allowing modest profit-making resulted in better quality and more reasonably priced care than the state could provide. Yet there is evidence that privately run care is of poorer quality and more expensive." Sonia Sodha shows that children’s homes have become centres of profit-making and abuse.

Peter Mitchell has seen through the campaign against the National Trust: "The treatment the National Trust has received for daring to understand its mission as to help us understand history, rather than supply us with fantasy, is a warning to all historians. This, ultimately, is what the trust’s critics are incensed by: that its properties are endowed with real historical meaning rather than comforting myth."

Tim Crook tells the story of Rudolph Dunbar, the pioneering musician, campaigning black journalist and war correspondent.

"As a kid to whom the world had always been kind, I had no doubt he would do it. I couldn’t wait for it to happen. Now, I marvel at the unlikeliness of it all: of life bending itself into the shape of happy-ever-after fiction – and how rarely that happens." Jon Hotten was there when Geoff Boycott scored his 100th century in the 1977 Ashes test at Headingley.

Johnny Restall offers a personal selection of portrayals of Lucifer and his minions in British horror cinema.