The Joy of Six 1270

Bobby Dean, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, argues that a return to austerity will not solve Britain's problems: "Starmer says he wants to end the politics of easy answers – and I agree. But on the exam question of 'how to fix Britain', he sidesteps complex answers in favour of a simple one that we have all heard before: we must tighten our belts."

To keep his government on track, Keir Starmer needs to restore the clout of the cabinet secretary and stamp out Downing Street factionalism, says Alex Thomas.

Adam Kucharski offers a guide to the bad-faith arguments people use on social media and how to defeat them.

"I go down there to get away from everything. And it’s a place you can time travel. You get this sense of the past that’s been locked away in the mud, sometimes for thousands of years." Harriet Sherwood on the growth in popularity of mudlarking on the Thames foreshore.

Rose Staveley-Wadham tells the story of all 34 British medallists from the 1924 Paris Olympics using local press cuttings: "Remaining in the sphere of athletics, there was another gold medal winner for Britain at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the shape of Douglas Lowe. His win, on the same day as Harold Abrahams’s, garnered less attention. For example, a small paragraph in the Halifax Evening Courier on 11 July 1924 noted how ‘the winner of the Olympic Games 800 metres race, Douglas Gordon Arthur Lowe, is an old Manchester Grammar School boy, who left the school when his family removed to London in 1917."

The scariest sound in film? Adam Scovell looks back on Jerzy Skolimowski's "visionary British horror oddity" The Shout.