The Joy of Six 1179

"The government’s own analysis shows that social housing pays back 69 per cent of the grant used to build it within 30 years, and 110 per cent within 60 years through reduced housing benefit expenditure." Peter Apps sets out the enduring case for building social housing.

Chris Harrop finds that the recent National Institute of Clinical Excellence review provides little evidence to support the use of electro-convulsive therapy to treat depression.

Coco Khan longs to destroy supermarket self-checkouts. 

"Once young newcomers who spent their early years working under Biddy on Blue Peter are now able to reflect on those days with several decades of experience and success. There is certainly criticism that Biddy’s way of working didn’t suit everyone, that her behaviour wouldn’t be acceptable in the present day and perhaps shouldn’t have been even at the time." Hannah Cooper reviews Richard Marson's Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter.

Ian Visits on the dig at the site that may have inspired the workhouse in Oliver Twist: "Archaeologists are excavating the 200-year-old St Pancras workhouse site before the site is redeveloped for Oriel, a new centre for eye care, research and education. The team focussed on areas of the site where workhouse buildings were demolished after being bombed during World War II."

"Like so many things in life, it was not as hard as I feared. No long, opaque, incomprehensible passages. Johnson wanted to see authors 'writing like it mattered, as though they meant it, and as though they meant it to matter' and his own work certainly demonstrates that." Iain Sharpe on eventually reading the work of B.S. Johnson.