The Joy of Six 1189

"Give or take the odd percentage point, and Sir John tries to persuade the media not to sensationalise small, meaningless poll movements, Labour has a solid lead of around 20 per cent over their Tory rivals. ... Parties in Downing Street during lockdown and the disastrous 49-day Truss premiership helped make up a lot of minds and the electorate don’t show any signs of forgetting or forgiving." John Curtice sees no signs of a Conservative revival in time for the next election.

John Jewell looks at three key moments in the phone-hacking scandal and at what happens next.

Mark Gatiss on the enduring appeal of the BBC’s Christmas ghost stories: "James’s stories do lend themselves very well to television shorts. They’re very clever short stories and, with the exception of ‘Casting the Runes’, they’re not epic. They’re very contained, which is very handy as you can achieve a lot with them on a small budget."

"For someone essentially leading the tempo and measuring impact of 50 other musicians, he made it look like he was doing all the work, sweating like he was carrying a grand piano single-handed up a flight of stairs. You looked at him more than you listened to the music." John Podhoretz on Maestro - and Leonard Bernstein.

The Gentle Author looks again at old photographs of London: "The slow exposures of these photographs included fine detail of inanimate objects, just as they also tended to exclude people who were at work and on the move but, in spite of this, the more I examine these pictures the more inhabited they become."

"The 'hobby horse' as we know it today is a children’s toy, a stick with a wooden horse’s head held between the legs and 'ridden” — but, in common with many activities and rituals we now relegate to children, hobby horses were once part of adult festivities. They were also particularly associated with Christmas time, and took a wider variety of forms than we see today. Francis Young argues that 'animal guising' customs offer important insights into British festive culture.