The Joy of Six 1099

"There was one document, though, that really galvanised Dickens: in early 1843, parliament was presented with a report on the extent of child labour in the country. It detailed unimaginable horrors: interviews with seven-year-olds who had spent half their lives in mines, smoking eight-year-olds who had been working so long their own fathers didn’t know when they started. Anecdotal evidence that 'young boys are taken down as soon as they can stand on their legs'." The Penguin Books site looks at the political background to A Christmas Carol.

"Difference does not lead us into a meaningless relativism, but rather into a perpetual quest to develop and share knowledge. If we forget the wisdom of Babel, then we think that the knowledge we have found matters more than what others have found in their own quests." We can still have wisdom even without transcendental insights, argues Ayram Alpert.

Carolyne Willow and Ian Dickson reflect on his 70 years in the care system - as child and professional: "He found a child who had run away from a residential school (at that time they were called 'absconders') and drove him back in his car, buying him sweets for the journey, only for the child to be beaten by the headteacher when he stepped through the door. After that, whenever Ian was sent out looking for children, and happened to find them, he would deliberately lose them."

Vithushan Ehantharajah on England's triumphant test series in Pakistan.

"Both as a book 'about' nature, farming and landscape, and 'about' childhood, Jane’s Country Year then is simultaneously explicitly and consciously of its time, yet also oddly, awkwardly timeless. I’m delighted to have read it this year and to have had the world of Malcolm Saville opened to me." Unpopular discovers my favourite author when I was a child.

Jamie Stone, Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, talks to Andy Boddington about being a pantomime dame.