The Joy of Six 1335

"We may think that the dangers we face today are unprecedented (and in some ways perhaps they are) but history has a way of circling back on itself. When Jo warned that 'Europe still needs Britain, and Britain, Europe' and called for a moment of 'political initiative' to build partnerships, it feels as timely and as necessary now as it did then." Marking 75 years since Jo Grimond was first elected as MP for Orkney and Shetland, Alistair Carmichael finds inspiration in a famous speech by the former Liberal leader.

Rachel Hewitt argues that telling boys and men that they're disadvantaged only hinders them further - and, anyway, it's not true: "If we really want to help boys and men be happier, then perhaps, as a society, we could forge a different and more positive outlook on masculinity, in which we focus less on how men are purportedly hard done by and emasculated compared to the last century, and more on the genuinely fulfilling opportunities that are open to them in this brave new world."

Liam Geraghty on a report that finds new housing estates are forcing their residents to rely on cars.

Only a quarter of students at the University of Edinburgh are Scottish, with the result, says Melissa Knight, that they have found themselves the unwanted target of discrimination from English snobs who often look down on, and mock them due to their accents or working-class backgrounds.

Alwyn Turner reminds us of an earlier politician who had ambitions to take over a party led by Nigel Farage." As far as the media were concerned, Kilroy-Silk was 'UKIP’s star turn', its leader-in-waiting. But he didn’t wish to wait. The man who’d once called on socialists to act with ‘a tint of arrogance’ was now sixty-two and impatient. At the party conference in October 2004, he set out his stall in a typically assured performance."

"Gormenghast is an edifice of stasis: ultra-conservatism and unchangingness is in a sense the whole point of the castle, and its society. Yet it is a place where there is the most amazing grotesque diversity and variety. When Titus leaves it and enters modernity he encounters many things, but a kind of flatness, a sameiness enters the telling." After many years, Adam Roberts reads the Gormenghast trilogy again.