The Joy of Six 1152

Joe Norris looks at the invaluable work of the Young Liberals in May's local elections and their success in getting their members elected to councils.

"I ask whether a Starmer-fronted supermajority would be good for standards in Westminster; it comes after one recent poll showed Labour could have as many as 460 seats after the next election. It prompts Bryant’s longest pause of the interview. I sense he may be torn between his instincts as parliamentary policeman and party politician." Josh Self interviews Chris Bryant about his new book Code of Conduct.

Colin Bradley argues that John Rawls' work shows that liberal values of equality and freedom are fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.

Donald Clarke reviews Face Down, a documentary about the Provisional IRA's murder of the German businessman Thomas Niedermayer: "The film digs up some still-startling horrors, but it also restores fleshed-out humanity to a decent man - more than a victim – who, like so many others, is often remembered just as a name spoken grimly on a distant news report."

"The writer Colin Wilson once said: 'I had taken it for granted that I was a man of genius since I was about thirteen.” For a short few months after the publication of his first book called The Outsider in 1956, it seemed that the rest of the world thought so too.'" Flashbak documents the rise and fall of Leicester's Angry Young Man of letters.

"So what did our excavations add to Dickens' picture of slums and squalor? The answer is that since there was no clear evidence that the houses were largely unoccupied, Jacob’s Island certainly was as bad as he described, and quite possibly worse." David Saxby on the archaeological investigation of one of the prime settings of Oliver Twist.