The Joy of Six 1261

"One gets the impression from the book that the Liberal Democrats is currently less a vehicle of ideology or social change and more an artefact of Britain’s electoral system. Indeed, the authors conclude with several reasonable goals - deduced from their empirical findings - for the party: "re-empowering the local", "a socially liberal party", "future proofing the party", and "the Liberal Democrats as a movement?" each of which would put the party on firmer ground." James Dennison reviews a new study of the party.

"We already have the Bob Willis Test at Edgbaston (prostate cancer) and the Ruth Strauss Foundation Test at Lord's, so why not the Graham Thorpe Test at The Oval? An event around the Test that raise awareness of mental health issues and money for mental health charities." James Buttler on the reaction to Graham Thorpe's death and his own mental health struggles.

Jacqueline Garget reports on the harnessing of technology to combat the invasion of American mink: "At the start of 2024, the team announced that it had cleared East Anglia - its 'core area' accounting for almost 5 per cent of England - of mink. The work had started in earnest in 2020, and for the last two years there was no evidence of mink reproduction following extensive trapping."

Dave Osland has been reading a study of the socialist journalist Paul Foot's career. 

"In Coalbrookdale at Night (1801), coke hearths above blast furnaces release giant plumes of yellow and orange smoke into the sky. The ironworks have cast the rest of the landscape in shadow, with a portion of the moon visible on the right. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon travels along metal rails that had been installed in 1767 to facilitate the transport of materials across the site." Stephanie O'Rourke looks at the way British landscape painting reacted to the Industrial Revolution: 

Brian Phillips celebrates the children's writer Joan Aiken, whose "favorite literary terrain was the blurred border where nineteenth-century realism begins to slip into folklore and fantasy. This is a realm of absurd stock characters and hoary narrative devices: cruel governesses, kindhearted orphans, counterfeit wills, hidden passageways, long-lost relations, doppelgängers, clues hidden in paintings, castaways, coincidences, sudden returns from the dead."