The Joy of Six 1186

Alexandra Hall Hall reminds us that the European Court of Human Rights is there to safeguard us against our own worst impulses, and that calls to leave its jurisdiction are deeply troubling.

"The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, comprising MPs and peers from both Houses of Parliament, is alarmed that attempts to interfere may be made in the next general election – with no proper protection for politicians and political parties - and have sought an urgent meeting with the National Cyber Security Centre to discuss the matter." David Hencke on new confirmation of Russian attempts to interfere in British elections.

Ian Acheson argues that it's not the Red Wall the Tories should be worrying about but the West Country.

Sir Robert Neill, a Conservative MP, argues that We should not send pregnant women to prison unless they have committed serious violent offences.

"It is not, perhaps, the fact that Ransome was a spy that we find so incredible. It is simply that the man who wrote Swallows and Amazons, who epitomised the plain talking and simple moral values that once made the empire great, could have been so complicated. In short it seems that we are doomed to think of Ransome according to the rigid stereotypes that informed his own novels." Author, journalist and dedicated bohemian, Arthur Ransome was a complicated person. Could he also have been a double agent? Roland Chambers examines the life of a man who spied for Britain at the same time as he fell in love with Trotsky's secretary

"The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy by Penelope Lively, published in 1971, is a classic of what would later become known as folk horror - and, indeed, what would later become known as young adult literature, long before either term had been coined." Francis Young says Lively's book seems more in tune with present-day preoccupations with the revival and reinvention of customs than with the ‘'survivalist' approaches to folklore that still largely held sway in 1971.