The Joy of Six 1100

"I was also lucky in being rescued by people I barely knew, friends and my family. I can never repay that debt but I can help others." Andy Boddington, a Liberal Democrat councillor from Shropshire, talks about his own experience of homelessness and about combating it in Ludlow.

Harry Pearse considers the arguments against giving children the vote and finds them wanting: "The fact that adults don’t need to show franchise credentials or an independence of mind shows that voting is not a privilege of competency, but rather a right of citizenship."

"He disliked cars, perceiving correctly that the post-War conviction that motor vehicles must dictate the future shape of cities had been responsible for wrecking many venerable town centres. One of his most successful books was Britain’s Lost Cities (2007), which pointed out in heartfelt terms the damage that planners of the sixties, seventies and still more recently, have done to Birmingham and Bristol, to Glasgow, Liverpool and many other places." Gillian Tindall remembers Gavin Stamp.

Joy Wiltenburg finds that the idea that women can't do humour is a 20th-century heresy.

"The community of the early modern English village was transposed to the vast and untamed New World, populated largely by the most enthusiastic religious adherents. To the claustrophobia of the village was added the terrifying emptiness of the wilderness that lurked beyond the homesteads—as well as aching fears engendered by subsistence farming thousands of miles from home, where the failure of the land or of the farmer’s skill meant death." Francis Young reviews of a book on the fear of witchcraft in 17th-century America.

There are pubs that claim to be the oldest in Britain, but most of these claims do not stand up to scrutiny. James Wright investigates the necessary criteria, from the age of the building to its history as a pub to its current use, to determine whether it is possible to declare a winner.