The Joy of Six 1199

Whether Donald Trump wins a second term as President or not, Europe must strengthen its defences and learn not to rely on the US, argues Wolfgang Münchau.

Chris Dillow says the Post Office scandal raises questions about the structure of our society: "The Post Office board and government ministers did not select honest or competent bosses. The police did not choose to investigate serious crimes. And the courts failed to correctly distinguish between the guilty and the innocent."

"Churches are being re-used, new houses constructed, Welsh chapels turned into holiday homes. Tall buildings increasingly disfigure the skyline of regional cities as in London. Over the next decade, the built environment will be under pressure as planning controls are relaxed." The work of updating Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series may be abandoned, fears Charles Saumarez Smith.

"Seeing that each entry is attached to a name may evoke the feeling of walking among tombstones with only tragic epitaphs, but in this each patient named is also humanised, often in a way greater than their treatment in the text or, indeed, the hospital." Public Domain Review introduces Sketches in Bedlam (1823)

D.J. Taylor analyses the pessimism of George Gissing: "You know, almost from the outset, that Godwin Peak, Born in Exile’s embittered hero, will fail to win the girl of his dreams and die in lonely misery, and the novel’s determinism is somehow exacerbated by the feeling of personal hurt that burns off its melancholy pages, the sense of a book that has been built brick by brick out of the wreckage of the writer’s own life."

Craig Lindsey on how the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple brought neo-noir to Texas.