The Joy of Six 1129

"The UK’s key institutions - including parliament and the courts - have yet to recover from the attacks that they suffered during the Brexit period." Forget misleading the Commons over Partygate, says Meg Russell, Boris Johnson's greatest dishonesty was misleading the nation over Brexit.

People who were privately educated are twice as likely to be consistent Conservative voters as people from the same social and economic background who attended state schools. That's the conclusion of research reported by the British Sociological Association.

Joanne W. Golann spent a year and a half at a 'no-excuses' US charter school: "Because teachers constantly narrated expectations for behaviour and scanned classrooms for compliance, students felt as if they were always under surveillance. Even the best-behaved students felt pressure."

"Children should not be reduced to mere 'future investments' or 'adults of tomorrow'. They are also people with present-day rights to citizenship, participation and autonomy in their living environments." Jonne Silonsaari et al. look at the ways social movements are changing European urban areas to make them more child friendly.

Eleanor Parker argues that the Norman Conquest brought new kinds of poetry from France, with new stories, language, and themes - and one of those themes was spring. "There’s something nice about the thought that spring has a history, and that its name, its associations, its meaning have changed over time. It’s not timeless, not always the same. Every year, spring arrives with a feeling of novelty, as if it had never happened before; ‘fresh’ is one of the words Chaucer most associates with it, and that feels right."

Lichfield Lore on the possibility that part of Lady Godiva's summer palace is in someone's living room in Staffordshire.