The Joy of Six 1084

"The thought occurs that maybe the Conservative Party no longer cares.  Perhaps the sum of its ambition is to become the provisional wing of the right-wing entertainment industry: happy to preach to a diminishing band of true believers, and good for a newspaper column or fringe TV turn, while Keir Starmer gets on with the tiresome business of actually running the country." Paul Goodman ponders the continuing appeal of Boris Johnson to Conservative members.

Patrick Barkham meets Guy Shrubsole, who is campaigning to double the one per cent of Britain's land area where rainforests endure: "There’s something so alluring about this weird, gnarled, dripping, moss-encrusted ecosystem. The fact that it sounds exotic but thrives very specifically on British weather is really magical. I wanted to re-enchant more people with the magic of the rainforest we have left in this country."

"Early on, the journal Nature rejected him because, as they told Lovelock: 'We don’t publish papers from home addresses. They mostly come from cranks.'" Roger Highfield profiles the late James Lovelock and asks if his death in July on his 103rd birthday marked the end of the golden age of the independent expert.

Neil Mackay meets the archaeologist Professor Tony Pollard, whose work has uncovered astonishing truths about Culloden, the Battle of Waterloo and even the Falklands campaign, and has helped bring peace to traumatised soldiers.

"Witchcraft is in the bones of Shropshire folk, if we are to believe Folklorist Charlotte Burne. She wrote that magic was so intertwined in the lives of people here, that when a new vicar took parish near Clee Hill, he was shocked to discover how prominent of a role it played in everyday life." Nearly Knowledgeable confirms my view of life in the Shropshire hills.

Samantha Yeo remembers living with a ghost who played her old music box and hid under her bed.