The Joy of Six 1149

"As a liberal I believe that we should all have equal access to decent facilities which we can use if we choose to. You should be able to walk to the pub or the school of the mosque within easy reach providing roughly the same standards of service whether for need or pleasure. The whole point of neighbourhoods is about enabling and not enforcing." Richard Kemp says we must destroy the '15-minute city' myths.

Josh Self decodes the Nigel Farage playbook: "He rails against 'the elite', ever-evoked but rarely defined by the privately-educated former stockbroker who spent 25 years working as an MEP. And he displays real skill in galvanising and directing sections of the British public at his unfortunate foes."

Anna Funder discovers that George Orwell's first wife Eileen has been written out of his life, not least by Orwell himself.

"Birmingham’s Trocadero was once the meeting place of the city’s Surrealists: Conroy Maddox, Emmy Bridgwater, brothers John and Robert Melville, Oscar Mellor and Desmond Morris. Between 1935 and the 1950s, these artists brought the strangest of all modern art movements to the Second City." Ruth Millington traces Birmingham's sites of Surrealism.

Joni Mitchell's surprise appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, 53 years after she first played there, marks another twist in her chameleonic career, says Annie Zaleski.

Jane Chelliah has been to see Barbie.