Six of the Best 977

A new kind of community politics - ‘flatpack democracy’ - has emerged in towns left to fend for themselves by the centre, reports John Harris.

Seth Thevoz is interviewed on the podcast The Making of a Historian about the role of clubs in 19th-century British politics.

Hearing voices can be frightening and isolating, but Bryony Sheaves says talking can help.

"Shot on location in London, The Long Good Friday explores a mixture of luxurious and post-industrial settings, but most vitally it is a last document of the docklands around the Thames before the developers – as dramatised in the film – bought the land to make way for the more monolithic towers that line the river today." Adam Scovell explores the film's locations 40 years on.

"Dickens’ genius was to wed the gothic with the sentimental, using stories of ghosts and goblins to reaffirm "basic bourgeois values; as the tradition evolved, however, other writers were less wedded to this social vision, preferring the simply scary. In Henry James’s famous gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw, the frame story involves a group of men sitting around the fire telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve - setting off a story of pure terror, without any pretension to charity or sentimentality." Colin Dickey calls for a revival of the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas.

Southwark Cathedral held for its cat - and quite right too: "I began by saying that she was her own cat and all attempts to make her a cosy cat failed.  She wasn’t interested in being cuddled or stroked, but she was interested in being here in her place of safety, especially after the terrorist attack which put her off ever going out of this sanctuary again."