The Joy of Six 1553

Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.

"The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted." Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia.

 Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."

In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.

"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.

Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."