Lloyd George’s oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall

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In 1992 the journalist Edward Pearce published a diary of that year's general election campaign. It was reviewed for the London Review of Books by Peter Clarke.

Here is Clarke on Lloyd George:

Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. 

As A.J.P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George's platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – "five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed" – was fit to bring the house down. 

He was the politician as entertainer, subordinating reason to emotion as much as any party political broadcast in the last campaign. He could pirouette, like Chaplin, from the broadest belly-laugh to tear-jerking pathos without having to say: "but to be serious for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ..." 

Yet, as the last of the great pre-electronic politicians, Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless. 

His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class constituency, and showed that the public meeting, in its classic form, was doomed. Baldwin could be relied upon to rise to the small occasion.

Failed teeth op woman admits drug driving

This tale of everyday life in Telford wins BBC News our Headline of the Day Award.

Golders Green: A milestone in the history of the tube and suburbia

Jago Hazzard sets out the history of Golders Green station, and tells us about the history of the London Underground and of London suburbia in the process.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not subscribe to his YouTube channel?

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Chris Dillow argues that if government wants to foster economic growth, it will have to fight for it: "Right now, the social transformation needed to raise growth requires the government to face down the powerful interests of, if not capital in general, then at least the more regressive elements of it such as rentiers, monopolists and media barons."

Virginia Heffernan investigates Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon, Edge. She finds that it infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science.

"'Free School Meals' and 'Free School Clothing' were an absolute lifeline for us ... That support meant I could walk through the school gates looking like everyone else, focusing on my education rather than the clothes on my back. It taught me that while education is a right, the cost of accessing it can be a barrier we must actively dismantle." Shaffaq Mohammed on the importance of the Lib Dem amendment, passed by the Lords, that will put a price cap on school uniforms.

Lauren Leek crunches the numbers to see why so many pubs have closed: "So here’s the political economy of pub closures. It is not: people stopped going. It is: pubs became collateral in leveraged buyouts, debt costs were passed down as higher rents and lower investment, and the pubs that couldn’t sustain the extraction closed, while the ones that could were reshaped into higher-margin branded concepts serving a wealthier clientele."

Did climate change lead to greater persecution of witches? York Historian weighs the evidence.

"Whenever a performer had a Muppet on their hand, they never broke character. So all the time in between takes, Gonzo would still be Gonzo and I was still talking to Gonzo, not Dave Goelz, who is the performer of Gonzo. I believed that Gonzo and Rizzo were my friends, and we were on an adventure together. Rizzo in particular, Steve Whitmire, was so funny. We would just play all day long." Kevin Bishop shares his memories of playing Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island with Brian VanHooker.

The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

See Charles Hawtrey and Joan Hickson staffing St Pancras in 1955

So I watched Simon and Laura, and found that, despite the presence of Ian Carmichael, who I always struggle with, it justifies the enthusiasm of that British Film Institute video I posted the other day.

But there is one scene that brought unexpected pleasure – click play above to watch it.

Peter Finch (Simon) has left his wife and is on his way back to Leicester. His agent (played by Hubert Gregg) catches up with him at St Pancras with news of the offer for the couple to star in the new BBC series.

It really is St Pancras, right down to the lovely maroon British Railways Midland Region enamel signs. 

A train to Bradford is announced, and one of the stations it calls at is Trent. (You can also hear Trent in a St Pancras announcement in the Kenneth More film The Comedy Man.)

Better still, the porter who takes Finch's luggage on to and then off the platform is Charles Hawtrey – this may well be the first time he has worked for the railways since A Canterbury Tale.

And the refreshment counter is in the charge of Joan Hickson. Enjoy.

In which William James uses a ladder to spy on G.K. Chesterton

In 1907 the American philosopher William James was invited to deliver a series of lectures to Manchester College in Oxford. (It was not then part of the University of Oxford: it educated Nonconformist students, who were barred by the university.)

After delivering the lectures, he went to stay with his brother, the novelist Henry James, in Rye. Seamus Perry, in the London Review of Books, tells what he got up to there:

He was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely "gurgled and giggled", he apparently came across as "lovable".

Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a "tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes"; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton's exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called "modern intellectualism".

Tyler Ballgame: For the First Time, Again

The Guardian introduces us to Tyler Ballgame – this is the title track from his first album, which was released last month:

"Not long after his first trip to London, a video of him performing live at a Los Angeles bar called the Fable began circulating online. By the time he came back to the UK to perform at Brighton industry showcase the Great Escape, he had signed to Rough Trade. Critical hosannas began raining down on Ballgame: he has variously been compared to Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley."

And there's more:

He also turned out to be catnip for what’s left of the music press, an interviewee with a penchant for the hippy-friendly philosophy of Alan Watts and an intriguing backstory. A Berklee College of Music dropout who spent years sequestered in his parents’ basement, struggling with depression and a gargantuan appetite for marijuana, he underwent a “spiritual awakening” thanks to the work of German self-help guru Eckhart Tolle – also beloved of Kendrick Lamar – and the intervention of a dietician and counsellor called Courtney Huard, who was subsequently murdered by her husband.

Who are all these people?

Moreover, he announced, Tyler Ballgame wasn’t just a stage name, it was a persona the former Tyler Perry had invented, drawing on his background in drama: playing the part of an “idealised frontman from the 60s and 70s” gave him “the licence to show more” of himself.

As to his music, Ballgame has been compared to a lot of other singers – Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Morrison and Tim Buckley. You can hear some of those influences here.

He's hardly the first artist to be derivative, but would it be a huge surprise if Ballgame turned out to have been generated by AI?

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Degenerate Art on Donald Trump's concentration camps and what can be done to resist their building: "When you consider the number – again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history – the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labour camps in the People’s Republic of China."

"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.

Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."

"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.

Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.

Britain's two most famous TV policemen on screen together in 1964

Between 1962, when he first appeared as Charlie Barlow in Z-Cars, and 1976, when he played the character for the last time in Second Verdict, Britain's most famous television policeman was Stratford Johns.

That baton was then taken on by John Thaw, who had begun playing Jack Regan in The Sweeney in 1975. He continued in that role until 1978 and then played Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000. (I don't remember their being any clear holder of the crown during that interregnum.)

And here they are together in a Z-Cars episode from 1964.

Trivia fans will be pleased that Sheila Hancock, who was married to John Thaw, played Miss Hannigan opposite Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks in the original London production of Annie.

John Osborne, Desert Island Discs and No Room at the Inn

I couldn't find room for it in my Lion & Unicorn article about the film No Room at the Inn, but I did blog here about my discovery that the Joan Temple play on which it was based gave John Osborne his first break in the theatre:

After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.

As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing. 

That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.

His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.

I was scrolling through the vintage editions of Desert Island Discs on the BBC website and found that Osborne was the castaway in one of them. Only six minutes remain of his 1959 appearance (he was on the programme again in 1982), but during them he confirms this story about No Room at the Inn.

Richard Jefferies Museum plans new Centre for Arts and Wildlife

The Richard Jefferies Museum, which is housed in the writer's birthplace at Coate Farm, Swindon, is raising money to fund its plans for a new Centre for Arts and Wildlife. You can read all about those plans on the museum website.

A spokesperson for the trust that runs the museum told the Swindon Advertiser:

"Our little museum has been growing – more events, more activities, more volunteers and more visitors.

"But we think it is time to grow some more, by creating something that will help the old farm site accommodate everything that's going on.

"So, we have come up with an idea for a new building to honour the things that were important to Jefferies, and are important to us."

You can read more about Richard Jefferies and his importance as a writer and thinker on the museum website.

Back in the Nineties I wrote my MA dissertation about Jefferies and gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture. The lecture took place in the church hall at Aldbourne in Wiltshire – the village where the classic Doctor Who story The Dæmons was filmed in 1971.

Simon and Laura (1955): How Muriel Box predicted reality TV

This short video explores an unexpected and exciting piece of film and television history. Muriel Box's 1955 film explored the perils of reality television 45 years before Big Brother was first screened.

Simon and Laura provided Peter Finch with his first leading role (Laura was played by Kay Kendall). His last film, Network in 1976, was also about television.

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Jessica Valenti sounds the alarm about the Heritage Foundation's plan for American women: "Like the conservative movement more broadly, the organisation wants young women to believe this is all being done for their benefit: that work is soulless and unfulfilling, that feminism has made women miserable, and that the real path to happiness is being a stay-at-home mom. The latest right-wing mantra for women? 'Less burnout, more babies.'"

The government’s proposed model for mandatory reporting of suspected child sexual abuse bears no resemblance to the frameworks used in the 82 per cent of countries that have enacted such legislation, argues Tom Perry.

Jonathan Cook believes the jury was right to acquit the Palestine Action defendants.

"It was the only post-war building on London’s South Bank to remain unlisted, refused protection on six separate occasions by successive culture secretaries, who since 1991 had repeatedly rejected Historic England’s (formerly English Heritage) recommendations." Richard Waite on the Listing of the South Bank Centre – that's the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery and their associated terraced walkways and stairs – after 35 years of refusals.

"The shifting appeal of The West Wing during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026?" Karrin Vasby Anderson and Nick Marx track the political drama's move from bipartisan hit to a polarised comfort watch.

Mansel Stimpson enjoyed Nouvelle Vague as I much as I did: "The casting ... which uses mainly relatively unfamiliar faces is one of the film's great successes. It is quite easy to accept Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Aubry Dullin catches the essence of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo. Even more surprisingly given that Breathless contains an iconic performance by Jean Seberg, we find this film’s best-known name, Zoey Deutch, creating a Seberg in whom we really do believe."

Now Leicestershire Reform want to get rid of their Private Pike

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When Reform UK formed a minority administration at Leicestershire County Council last May, 22-year-old Joseph Baum was made deputy leader and the cabinet member for adult social care. He had lost both roles by August.

Now comes news that Reform's council leader, Dan Harrison – who has to play Captain Mainwaring to Boam's Private Pike – wants him out of the party altogether and has written to Richard Tice to that effect.

BBC News reports:

In a letter seen by the BBC, Dan Harrison criticised his former deputy council leader Joseph Boam over a social media post in which he stated "I stand with ICE" hours after federal immigration agents fatally shot nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month.

In his letter, Harrison said that 79 complaints had been made against Reform UK councillors since the party took control, of which 40 were about Boam:

"What has been Joseph's reaction?" Harrison added. "He blamed it all on the woke left-wing, fake news or political smears.

"I was appalled at his lack of ownership of the problems he created."

Harrison said the ICE post was "the final straw", prompting him to contact Tice.

He added: "I know other party members will be writing to you to urge you to kick Joseph out of the party. 

Leicester Gazette reminds us that another Leicestershire Reform councillor made pro-ICE comments, but has since withdrawn them and apologised.

Boam himself claims to be well thought of at Reform head office. Which may, of course, be true.

GUEST POST Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires"

Anselm Anon says Liberal Democrats should be concerned about concentrations of economic power as well as about concentrations of political power.

It is axiomatic for liberals that power ought to be dispersed and accountable. The Liberal Democrats tends to be fairly good at articulating this when it comes to political structures – supporting an elected House of Lords, empowering local government, opposing mayors and PCCs who have "dubious democratic mandates and little scrutiny".

In contrast, the party’s approach to concentrated and unaccountable power that derives from wealth, as distinct from politics, is much more patchy. Ed Davey should be credited for his response to the Epstein scandal, and for standing up to Elon Musk on a range of issues. But he has been unwilling to move much beyond a critique of bad individual American billionaires, to the illiberal concentration of power which great wealth inevitably entails.

With reference to tech oligarchs, he writes:

I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals … to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people. That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them.

This is an excellent starting point, but needs to be supported by tangible and far-reaching policies.

The existence of all billionaires* is a structural problem. There are perhaps three broad reasons why the Liberal Democrats have not sufficiently acknowledged this, but each can be challenged. 

First, some billionaires fund worthy causes, from the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, to Sir Chris Hohn’s support for action on climate change. Joseph Rowntree died in 1925, but his philanthropy continues to do a great deal of good, inspired by liberal values. Yet even if they are sympathetic characters, that doesn’t negate the systemic problem that billionaires are inherently over-mighty.

Liberal Democrats rightly reject the ‘good chap’ approach to Britain’s political institutions, which assumes the benign personal qualities of political actors. They are right to insist on robust formal structures, based on a written constitution. We wouldn’t want hereditary peers in the House of Lords, even if they all had the sensibilities of successive Earls Russell. And the same should go for billionaires: however well-meaning, they shouldn’t be allowed to wield unaccountable power, or pass it on to their children, which means that they shouldn’t be allowed to amass wealth beyond a certain point.

Secondly, there may be electoral calculation at play. Liberal Democrat voters, and constituencies represented by the party’s MPs, tend to be wealthier than average. It is sensible to be hesitant about alienating people who earn comfortable salaries and own detached houses. But hostility to the existence of billionaires need not entail this.

The sort of affluent citizen in her fifties in Tunbridge Wells, who now votes Liberal Democrat, but previously supported Blair and Cameron, knows all about the malign effects of the concentration of wealth. She knows about her daughter's experience in the rental market, about her father's experience in a care home owned by private equity, and her own experience of a water company which exists solely to amass capital for its investors. 

The party is well able to make it clear to her that hostility to the existence of billionaires is not an attack on her bourgeois lifestyle. And it is an electoral imperative, too, because we want her daughter, and the staff of her father’s care home (and her father!) to vote for the Liberal Democrats, and to become involved in the party.

The third obstacle is perhaps the most deeply rooted within Liberal Democrat thinking. There is a very sound liberal instinct to let people get on with their own personal and collective projects, without impediment or judgementalism. The distinction between public and private spheres of life is essential to liberalism. If someone wants to devote her energies to climbing the very highest Himalayas, or being the greatest ever tennis player, or winning at chess, or studying hard and becoming an eminent professor, then she is welcome to get on with it. 

But being a billionaire is never a private choice: it is inherently public, because decisions about how to invest and spend so much money have an enormous effect, even if the billionaire doesn’t make overt political interventions, such as donating to a political party, or underwriting a newspaper.

And the existence of billionaires inevitably induces some politicians to serve their interests, even if less cravenly than Peter Mandelson. Great wealth is inherently different in kind, not just in scale, from the resources of the bulk of the population, and this is inherently political.

So, one of the central aims of the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy should be to inhibit the creation and continuation of billionaires. I won’t go into the details of this, but starting points would include different approaches to taxing wealth (especially land), to inheritance, to regulating monopolies and oligopolies, and to the offshore tax havens controlled by Britain. 

At the moment, it seems that the Liberal Democrats are willing to be tough on (some) billionaires, but not on the causes of billionaires. This isn’t a call for the class warfare of the far left, or the inchoate left-populism of Zack Polanski’s Green Party, but to work through the implications of liberal insights when applied to economic power, as well as to political structures.

Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.

* I use "billionaire" as a shorthand for "an individual or family possessing so much wealth that it would distort a liberal society". I suspect the relevant amount is much less than one billion pounds, but won’t pursue that here.

Sign language was used in a Leicester Cathedral wedding in 1576

Leicester Cathedral held a service on Sunday to commemorate the 450th anniversary of a wedding there in which sign language was employed. 

A document found in the Leicestershire Record Office shows that the language was used in a marriage ceremony at St Martin's Church – now Leicester Cathedral – on 6 February 1576.

The BBC News report helpfully transcribes part of it:

Thomas Tillsye and Ursula Russel were marryed: and because the sayde Thomas was and is naturally deafe and also dumbe, so that the order of the forme of marriage used usually amongst others which can heare and speake could not for his parte be observed… the sayde Thomas, for the expression of his minde instead of words, of his own accorde used these signs…

First he embraced her with his armes, and took her by the hande, putt a ring upon her finger and layde his hande upon her harte, and held his hands towards heaven; and to show his continuance to dwell with her to his lyves ende he did it by closing of his eyes with his hands and digging out of the earthe with his foote, and pulling as though he would ring a bell with divers other signs approved.

In Sunday's service readings and prayers were made in British Sign Language and songs were sung by a deaf choir from the Church of the Good Shepherd – a ministry for deaf and hard of hearing people based in Leicester.

St Martin's Church became a cathedral when Leicester regained its city status in 1919. Leicester was a city under the Romans and was treated as one by the Domesday Book, but lost the title in the 13th century.

Westminster Hall debate on Russian influence on British politics

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On Monday there was a Westminster Hall debate on Russian influence on UK politics and democracy, occasioned by a public petition that gained the required 100,000 signatures.

Allowing such petitions to trigger debates seems a worthwhile experiment, though the one demanding that MPs who change parties should be forced to resign and fight a by-election seems to me misconceived. Don't party whips have enough power as it is?

But it's worth reading the transcript of the debate on Russian interference. Several Liberal Democrats MPs took part – here's Cameron Thomas:

The breadth and depth of Russian influence is so vast and so dangerous to our democracy that no single political party has either the credibility or capacity to fully investigate it. Only a judge-led statutory public inquiry will suffice. The Government have the responsibility to deliver; the future of our democracy requires that they do so.

The House of Commons Library produced a briefing for the debate which is worth a look too.

The Zombies: Care of Cell 44

It took 40 years for the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle to be recognised as one of the great albums of the Sixties, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that its opening track wasn't a hit as  single.

But Care of Cell 44 sounds like 1967 sunshine in a bottle now: Mellotron, harmonies and a great bass part.

Finding the last traces of England's lost river

When I blogged about the Hulmes Ferry a couple of years ago, I discovered that the Manchester Ship Canal is a canalisation of the lower reaches of the River Irwell.

This video sets out to find what remains of those lower reaches between Salford and the Mersey at Eastham.

Tributes paid to Jim Wallace in the Holyrood chamber

The funeral of Jim Wallace – Baron Wallace of Tankerness – took place earlier today at St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. Eulogies were given by Liam McArthur and Alasdair Carmichael.

Last week MSPs from all parties paid their tributes to him as a motion of condolence was moved at Holyrood.

The presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, said: 

This is my 27th year in the Scottish Parliament, and I know that, without Jim Wallace, Parliament would be a different place – a lesser one. Jim lived our parliamentary values of wisdom, integrity, justice and compassion, which were constantly demonstrated through his incredible career. His steadying hand in some challenging early days was just what was needed. Jim Wallace is a pillar of this Parliament.

The first minister, John Swinney, said:

Jim was a lifelong adherent of the Liberal tradition in Scotland. Although he led the Scottish Liberal Democrats, he first joined the Scottish Liberal Party, which emerged from a radical tradition of politics in our country, with a commitment in its foundations to home rule for Scotland. Consistent political support for the concept of Scottish self-government, pressure to establish a Scottish Parliament and the hard work to turn it into practice through the work of the consultative steering group were all part of the contribution that was made by Jim Wallace.

And our own Willie Rennie said:

Jim endured many political crises through his 13 years as party leader, six years as Deputy First Minister, five years as a UK Government minister and 43 years as a parliamentarian in three different Parliaments. Most politicians would have copious amounts of baggage as a result of those experiences, but such was the mark of his success that he went on to occupy the position of moderator, which is probably the closest to God that you can get in the Church of Scotland.

Last year, following the memorial service reception for George Reid in this Parliament, with a fierce storm raging outside, I took the unusual step of skipping canvassing in Fife that day. Instead, I joined Nicol Stephen, Jeremy Purvis and Jim for a very long lunch. I am so glad that I did. We shared memories, we traded gossip, and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed.

Llama drama! "Hero" rescue llamas who narrowly escaped death stop offender fleeing from police in Derbyshire

Derbyshire Times wins our Headline of the Day Award by a distance with its tale of crime-fighting llamas.

The judges have asked me to point out that my photograph shows alpacas, who would probably have pointed the offender on his way after asking him to admire their hairdos.

Nouvelle Vague – The blog post does not describe the film: the film bends towards the blog post

I saw Nouvelle Vague at the Phoenix in Leicester this afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed it. The film tells the story of the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature Au Bout de Souffle in 1959 and recreates a whole era: the black-and-white cinematography, the fashion, the music.

It manages both to laugh at and to laugh with Godard's pretensions and eccentricities, making him a compelling figure despite everything. Do not be surprised if you find me wearing dark glasses, smoking Gitanes and issuing gnomic, Godardesque pronouncements.

The blog post does not describe the film: the film bends towards the blog post.

Labour's problem is that its leadership has contempt for its voters

Political activists are treated by their leaders as a stage army to be marched on and berated when they want to show the media how tough they are.

I wrote that in a recent article for Lion & Unicorn.

It strikes me that Keir Starmer and the people around him now treat Labour voters in much the same way.

The views reported in this tweet from yesterday afternoon shows what I have in mind. Because Net Zero and Rejoin are both popular with Labour voters.

Maybe the disappearance of Morgan McSweeney will see a change, but Starmer has little background in the Labour Party and no obvious love for it.

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Julia Baird says there are many questions that the people in Epstein's web of connections have never answered, but this one perplexes her most: "Why is it that so many of Epstein's circle of male friends – inner, outer, bestie, acquaintance – have never decried or confessed to seeing something suspicious or concerning in his conduct or environment, while the few women who have spoken, thought it was blatantly obvious he was an 'abhorrent' creep?"

"For decades, Mandelson was both an irritant for the press and a reliable source of leaks, gossip, and backbiting. The part missing from many of the post-mortems on his political career that have appeared in newspapers and news programmes this week is how often he appeared as a media figure, treated as a 'sensible' big beast of British democracy." Mic Wright reminds us that the journalists pretending to be surprised about Peter Mandelson's character have used him as a resource for years.

Nathan Ley gives the reason why Council Tax keeps going up while council services get worse: the cost of adult social care.

Hedgehogs are disappearing fast – in fact they are vulnerable to extinction in the UK. Kate Moore lists some practical steps we can take to save them.

Hillary Burlock explains that not knowing how to dance could ruin your reputation in Regency Britain: "Dancing masters were crucial to transforming girls and boys into ladies and gentlemen, equipping them with the skills necessary to perform when they made their entrance into society around the age of 18."

"The Amish community, along with their traditions, customs and way of life, serve as an integral part of the movie, not a picturesque backdrop to the main arc of the story." Sven Mikulec finds Peter Weir's Witness is a deep, subtle and complex social comment disguised as a police thriller.

A picture of the Sisters at the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes, High Leicestershire

Another illustration from the Lord Bonkers universe reaches us. I wouldn't like to tangle with this lot in a closely contested by-election.

Now read about an early encounter with these redoubtable nuns.

Morgan McSweeney's kitchen cabinet met at Roger Liddle's home

A ghost from the SDP is haunting the Guardian Politics Live this evening.

The blog quotes Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, as welcoming Morgan McSweeney’s resignation but saying more needs to be done to tackle factionalism within the party:

"It is a start, but we need to know how decisions have been made in the Labour party, including the role of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, and how this whole culture will turn away from the factionalism to an inclusive culture which seeks to listen and engage MPs and prevent future errors over policy."

And the then it provides some context for her remarks:

It has been reported that McSweeney convened a "kitchen cabinet" of like-minded Labour figures who met on Sunday evenings at the London home of Roger Liddle, a Labour peer and old friend of Mandelson.

Liddle was made a peer in 2010 and took the Labour whip. You wouldn't know it from his Wikipedia entry but he was once a leading light of the SDP. 

He was an SDP member throughout its existence (1981-88) and served on its national committee. He was then a Liberal Democrats until the mi-1990s,

Liddle was a parliamentary candidate for his old parties, fighting Vauxhall in 1983, the Fulham by-election in 1986, and Hertfordshire North in 1992. 

He had been a special adviser to Bill Rodgers when he was a Labour minister before the 1979 general election and left Labour with him.

But later, with the rise of New Labour, Liddle became a close associate of Peter Mandelson and rejoined the party. In the days when I was on the Lib Dem federal policy committee and had a Commons press pass, he seemed to be at every political event I attended.

Bat for Lashes: Laura

Bat for Lashes is the stage name of Natasha Khan, who wrote this beautiful song with Justin Parker. To prove that there's no justice in this world, it reached only number 144 in the UK singles chart in the summer of 2012. I didn't know there was a number 144.

But cheer up, because Natasha Khan also provides us with out Trivial Fact of the Day.

In the Seventies, when there was an upsurge of interest in the game of squash, we heard a great deal about the "Khan squash dynasty" from Pakistan, and it turns out that Natasha is a member of it.

Her grandfather Nasrullah Khan was the coach who helped Jonah Barrington (born in Cornwall, Irish by adoption) become the best player in the world in the early Seventies. Her uncle Jahangir Khan dominated the sport as a player in the Eighties.

Wikipedia, with help from an article in the Telegraph, says of Natasha:

The family moved to Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, when Khan was five years old. She attended many of her family's squash matches, which she felt inspired her creativity: "The roar of the crowd is intense; it is ceremonial, ritualistic, I feel like the banner got passed to me but I carried it on in a creative way. It is a similar thing, the need to thrive on heightened communal experience." 

After her father left the family when Khan was eleven, she taught herself to play the piano, which became "a channel to express things, to get them out".

The railway comes to Camden: Happy birthday Charles Dickens

It's Charles Dickens' birthday. He was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth – you can visit the house where he was born.

To celebrate the day, here is his description of the effect the building of the London to Birmingham railway had on Camden:

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. 

Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. 

There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

This is all one paragraph in Dombey and Son, but I feel sure that Dickens would use shorter ones if he were writing a blog post.

The Joy of Six 1472

"The fallout from the latest revelations has again put survivors secondary to the actions of powerful men. Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, initially declined to apologise to Epstein’s victims and distance himself from any knowledge of the financier’s sex crimes." Victims have told us the worst of Epstein’s crimes for decades – and  but they are still being ignored, says Lindsey Blumell.

Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, kidnap and deport undocumented residents. The goons soon found themselves outnumbered, as well as watched, followed, tracked and sometimes stymied by rapidly organised networks of civilians, who use text chains, plastic whistles, car horns and in one case a trombone to discomfit the would-be kidnappers and warn their potential victims."

Anna Fazackerley and Tam Patachako travel to Southend to see what happens to a city when its university closes.

"The 'laissez-faire' of free trade was ... less an ideological commitment to the free market or a desire to give free rein to rich capitalists as it was an effort to feed the poor, foster world peace and cosmopolitan friendship, and erode the baleful and unjustly got power of land-owning aristocrats." Paul Crider speaks up for Manchester Liberalism.

"She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural." Jonathan Jones goes to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum, Cardiff.

Cavan Scott encounters Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh in New York.

The lost streets of Park Hill, Sheffield

Any regular user of Sheffield station will be familiar with the Park Hill flats on the hillside above it. Until they were built between 1957 and 1961, this was an area of terraced houses, shops, pubs, a cinema and at least one church.

In this video Tour Obscure climbs the hill to see what remains of this old landscape. The really good news is that there are two more videos in this series.

Brown bears, lynx and wolves could be seen again in Rutland

A planning application has been submitted to build the Wild Rutland attraction on Burley Estate farmland, parkland and woods between the Oakham bypass, Rutland Water and Burley Wood, reports BBC News:

Long-term aspirations could see native animals including Eurasian brown bears, lynx and wolves reintroduced inside holding pens, according to developers.

Planning documents said the project would showcase "the wonder of British wildlife" if given the go ahead.

Lord Bonkers is all in favour (I suspect he may he an investor om the project). When I ask what would happen if the brown bears, lynx and wolves escaped, he merely replies that the Rutland Water Monster would soon devour them.

I remain unconvinced that the locals will take such a sanguine view, as too many of them will remember the sudden demise of the Bonkers Hall safari park, even if the old boy "still maintains that those nuns were the authors of their own misfortune".

But seriously folks, this sounds rather fun.

Dixon of Dock Green: "It's not jolly – in fact it's unremittingly grim"

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Dixon of Dock Green does not deserve its reputation for cosiness. I wrote to that effect three years ago, but Tim Dowling was there long before me.

Here he is choosing a box set of the police drama back in 2012:

The stories are as gritty as anything you would find in The Bill, and happy outcomes are rare. In the little monologues that top and tail each programme, Dixon is likely to tell you the suspect was never convicted due to a lack of evidence, or that a wife-beater escaped punishment because the police were powerless to intervene. 

It's not jolly – in fact it's unremittingly grim. Bodies turn up in slag heaps. Depressed coppers kill themselves, and no one dares say so. "The coroner's verdict was death by misadventure," says Dixon, "and none of us would quarrel with that."

What charges might Peter Mandelson face in court?

Barrister at law Alan Robertshaw is our guide to the complexities of the law on insider trading and misconduct in public office.

"A man of profound faith and exceptional talent": Alistair Carmichael pays tribute to Jim Wallace

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Alistair Carmichael has written a tribute to Jim Wallace – "a man of profound faith and exceptional talent" – for The House magazine. You can find it on the Politics Home website:

At a time when our political debate is often ill-tempered, Jim’s career is a reminder that to be productive our politics should allow parties to cooperate where they agree. He led the Scottish Liberal Democrats into and through the Scottish Constitutional Convention that eventually produced the blueprint for the Scotland Act of 1998. He then led us into a coalition with Scottish Labour in the first Scottish Parliament.

It was a government that had an enduring legacy, delivering change in areas such as free personal care for the elderly, which governments in the rest of the UK have struggled to achieve more than 20 years on.

When he eventually left the Scottish Parliament in 2007, he was an obvious candidate for nomination to the House of Lords. There he remained an active contributor until his death. As Lord Wallace of Tankerness he handled the chamber with consummate ease as advocate general for Scotland in the coalition government and later as leader of the Liberal Democrat Lords group.

The Joy of Six 1471

"Without doubt, information provided during the height of the global financial crisis by a senior Member of the British Government, will have been operationally beneficial to a hedge fund manager, international financier and broker like Jeffrey Epstein. Without doubt, Mandelson will have known this when he was sending this information." Gareth Roberts makes the case for charging Peter Mandelson with misconduct in public office.

Catherine Barnard and Denzil Davidson ask if Greenland can join the European Union: "Whether Greenlanders decide that it should be attempted, and how such an attempt would be received in Washington, will be an important question for the geopolitics of the High North and the EU’s role in it."

Laura Laker on the battles over Haringey's delivery of one of the largest simultaneous rollouts of Low Traffic Neighbourhood zones in London, and of 36 school streets covering 44 schools.

"The full origins of Epstein’s wealth remain shrouded in mystery, but what is clear, according to Forbes' review of court filings, an investigative memo and financial records, is that Epstein relied above all on two billionaire clients and a tax gimmick to build his fortune." How did Jeffrey Epstein get so rich? Giacomo Tognini and John Hyatt investigate.

John Mullan sings the praises of Dombey and Son: "Like all great Dickens novels it has really satisfying baddies. Major 'Joe' Bagstock, one of those who predates on the loftily oblivious Mr Dombey, is a sinister, blue-faced old soldier with the disconcerting habit of talking of himself in the third person to an invisible confidante. 'He's hard-hearted, Sir, is Joe – he's tough, Sir, tough, and de-vilish sly!'"

"I don’t know the Lake District very well, but back in 2015 I went to see the last Golden Eagle that lived alone on the dark crags above Haweswater Reservoir. At the time, I didn’t realise how lucky I was to watch it soar above me, because by 2016 it had gone, presumed dead somewhere in the mountains and thus ending the history of breeding Golden Eagles in England." Mary Colwell on Lee Schofield and his book Wild Fell.

Essex village locals baffled by £7k duck crossing sign because they have 'no ducks'

"Unlike the England cricket team," remarked one of the judges. Together with her fellows, she gave our Headline of the Day Award to Essex Live.

Alwyn Turner on the political radicalism of L. du Garde Peach

I'm enjoying Alwyn Turner's new book A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars, and not just because my name turns up in the acknowledgements at the back. As Andrew Marr says in his New Statesman review, 

Turner builds his account on newspapers and popular magazines. This produces a bottom-up, sharp and often surprising read. 

And Turner's research is commendably thorough. Here he is on L. du Garde Peach, sharing far more than I knew about the author of most of Ladybird Books' Adventures from History series:

If the stage and screen were tightly censored The same was not quite true of the BBC, which had a greater tolerance for political work, so long as it was progressive without being revolutionary. The dramatist L. du Garde Peach, described by the papers as "broadcasting's most versatile playwright" was a committed writer – a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate, and a supporter of the League of Nations and the Peace Pledge Union – and some of his BBC work dealt with difficult subjects: the economic exploitation of Africa in Ingredient X (1929), rural poverty in Bread (1932), the Elizabethan roots of the slave trade in John Hawkins, Slaver (1933), local politics in Our Town (1935).

In Patriotism Ltd (1937), a satirical one-act drama, Peach depicted an arms company deliberately provoking conflict between the invented nations of Andania and Segoviaa And selling weapons to both. It was a story, he said, of "two countries brought to the brink of war by a mixture of buffoonery, self-interest and opportunism which you will find nowhere else in the world except in most of the Chancelleries of Europe. Advance notices said it had a "simple directness that is continually amusing", and talked of the way it exposed "bland cynicism on the part of the firm and its customers".

Three days before its scheduled broadcast, however, the government leaned on the BBC, and the piece was withdrawn, on the grounds that "it might be mistaken for a comment on current national affairs". Which, of course, it was. "No direct veto has been exercised by the Postmaster General," it was reported, but the BBC was given to understand that such a broadcast would be looked upon in an unfavourable light." Peach, who was not personally told about the ban, was furious: "I regard the action as just another instance of BBC timidity."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Otto.

Jeff Buckley: Lover, You Should've Come Over

When Jeff Buckley drowned at the age 30, he had released just one album but was an internationally celebrated artist. His name is often yoked with that of his father Tim Buckley, who died two years younger, but they only met once.

Richard Jefferies: If we had never before looked upon the earth

During Covid lockdown in 2020, the actor Simon Russell Beale, who lives in the town, recorded some readings from the work of my man Richard Jefferies for the Marlborough Literary Festival. You can still find them on the festival's website.

The extract below is from one of those readings. It's taken from Jefferies' essay Wild Flowers, which is included in his collection The Open Air, published in 1885.

If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away. 

So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass. It has another meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak differently, for a heart that has once known sorrow reads behind the page, and sees sadness in joy. But the freshness is still there, the dew washes the colours before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild flowers—unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded. 

I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each, although I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh. They never lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild flower it feels a new thing. 

The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe so near to us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the yellowhammers most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the sky, has never faded from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in flowers.

Thank you. I needed that. 

What the latest Epstein revelations mean for the Royal Family

I review Andrew Lownie's Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York in the latest Liberator. 

Here he talks about what the revelations contained in the latest batch of Epstein files mean for the Royal Family – Andrew and Fergie in particular.

The Joy of Six 1470

Timothy Snyder reports from a frightened city: "In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians."

"I think the way he is trying to interfere with our democracy, generally our country, is quite outrageous. For the richest man to come here with his totally unfounded and ignorant comments is shocking." Interviewed by Big Issue, Ed Davey sticks it to Elon Musk.

"The use of armed militia to terrorise the inhabitants of Minneapolis is not just beyond the rule of law, it is fascistic. It’s the final evidential point between what is happening today and the political forces that ripped Europe apart in the last century: and that’s not just me saying this, it’s some of the most eminent historians of authoritarianism." Carole Cadwalladr says what’s happening in the US is technofascism and it could happen here.

Madeleine Brettingham on the difficulty of making a living as a writer today: "The biggest revolution in how writing is distributed since the printing press has decimated all our assumptions about how creative careers work. Somewhere between the noughties and the pandemic everything changed, leaving many (including me) attempting to climb up ladders that no longer exist."

Norma Clarke reviews a book on working-class lives in Charlie Chaplin's London: "Charlie was a gutter child, a 'street arab' in the language of the time: undersized, skinny, his bright eyes on the main chance as he roamed up and down between Kennington and New Cut, where market stalls overflowed with produce he had no money to buy and probably became adept at stealing."

Did a tsunami hit the Bristol Channel four centuries ago? Simon Haslett revisits the great flood of 1607.

When Peter Lee took 8-13 for Great Bowden

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Peter Lee, the former Northamptonshire and Lancashire seam bowler, has died at the age of 80.

He grew up near Market Harborough in the Northamptonshire village of Sibbertoft and made his debut for that county in 1967. 

But it was when he moved to Lancashire in 1972 that his career really took off. He twice took 100 wickets in a season for them in an era when the feat was already becoming vanishingly rare, but never won test selection.

A trawl of the British Newspaper Archive reveals this story from the Leicester Daily Mercury, 6 August 1980. Great Bowden is nearly, but not quite, part of Market Harborough:

Bowden's Secret Weapon Shocks Wigston

Wigston Town cricketers had a nasty shock in their match against Great Bowden for they found themselves facing Lancashire pace bowler Peter Lee.

After Great Bowden had made 131. Wigston were blasted out for 88 with Lee taking 8-13.

Lee hails from a village called Sibbertoft which is just over the border in Northamptonshire and has two brothers in the Bowden team.

He has been injured recently and his guest appearance was part of his build-up to regain full fitness.

Wigston were on the receiving end another top-line bowler some years ago when Harold Rhodes took all 10 wickets against them for just 11 runs in a match at Matlock.

Ed Davey is right to call for police investigation of Peter Mandelson

These allegations are incredibly serious, it is now only right that the police investigate Peter Mandelson for potential misconduct in public office.

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— Ed Davey (@eddavey.libdems.org.uk) 2 February 2026 at 15:00

Ed Davey is right:

These allegations are incredibly serious, it is now only right that the police investigate Peter Mandelson for potential misconduct in public office.

The prime minister, it seems, has just announced a Cabinet Office inquiry into the affair, but there's a danger that it will just be good chaps investigating other good chaps and end up being seen as a whitewash. So let's send for the men in big boots.

The glorious story of Shacklewell and De Beauvoir Town

Another walk with John Rogers:

This East London walk takes is into the surprising hidden corners of the London Borough of Hackney. Our urban stroll explores the historic areas of Shacklewell and De Beauvoir Town, both with rich and fascinating histories. Starting on Mare Street we follow Amhurst Road to Shacklewell Lane and the site of Shacklewell House which had been an important country house from at least the 16th century. 

We then take a look at the Somerford Grove Estate designed by Frederick Gibberd in the late 1940s and winner of a prize at the Festival of Britain of 1951. Crossing Kingsland Road we then wander the streets of one of London's most beguiling hidden neighbourhoods, De Beauvoir Town. Developed in the 1830s this Victorian area was saved from demolition in the 1960s and remains one of London's true hidden gems.

It didn't make this YouTube blurb, but towards the end we also see the home of the Hackney Mole Man, who was made famous by Iain Sinclair.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and he blogs at The Lost Byway.

Sir Walter Scott invented "The Wars of the Roses"

Here's an interesting passage from Chris Given-Wilson in a recent London Review of Books:

There are several earlier references, dating back at least to the early 14th century, to red and white roses being used occasionally as insignia by the families later associated with the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, but it was not until Shakespeare picked up on the idea in Henry VI Part I... that it entered the popular imagination. ...

It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings deposed (one of them twice) and fifteen internecine ‘battles’ – some of them in reality just skirmishes – fought on English soil, from Dartford in Kent to Hexham in Northumberland to Mortimer’s Cross on the Welsh border.

There are those, of course, who would like to bin the label, but that is a vain hope. During the last quarter of the 20th century at least seven British historians published monographs entitled The Wars of the Roses, and scholars in the 21st century appear to be trying to keep pace.

Sure enough, Given-Wilson was reviewing The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War by John Watts.

Obliging reader's voice: I gather the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth is accepted as having marked the end of these wars. Have you by any chance contributed an article that touches upon it to Central Bylines recently?

Liberal England replies: Why yes! Yes I have.