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"Adults are going hungrier to keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets - are already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage." Alex de Waal on starvation in Gaza.

Ben Jackson says the government must change direction on child poverty: "When governments are remembered after they lose office, their achievements are unforgivingly distilled into a few pithy bullet points. Does Keir Starmer really want one of his bullet points to be that he was the unusual Labour prime minister who presided over an increase in child poverty?"

Rose Dixon reports the success of Iceland's experiment with a four-day working week.

"The men would wait for the Germans to pass over them and then come out at night. Their role was not to fight the Germans face-to-face. Their brief was to hit the supply chain, causing enough chaos to slow down the German advance, blowing fuel and ammunition dumps, destroying railway lines, bridges, and convoys. Local country houses that had been taken as German HQs were to be destroyed and German officers and British collaborators assassinated." Andrew Chatterton explains how the British Resistance would have fought Nazi occupiers.

"Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be 'an ogre, a princess, an ass,' as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody." Michael Schulman tells the story of how Meryl Streep battled Dustin Hoffman, retooled her role and on her first for Kramer vs. Kramer.

Peter Black discovers an Edwardian mystery: The story of Violet's Leap.

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Wera Hobhouse demands to know why she was deported from Hong Kong.

"As we toured the site - not just the blast furnace but the iron ore and coal piles and the continuous casting works and the rod mill and the old coke ovens, shut down a couple of years ago - we began to glean that the workers here were reeling from a terrible shock. Most of them were just discovering, that very day, that Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death." Ed Conway tries to get to the bottom of what is happening at Scunthorpe.

"Could we see protests akin to the Luddite attacks - this time targeting server farms instead of knitting frames?" John Cassidy discusses how we might survive the AI revolution.

Michael Mechanic and Nina Berman report allegations of abuse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida: "The scientists came out with an announcement that was disturbing, if not surprising. They had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched."

"The four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. 'You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.'" J. Hoberman reconsiders Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film.

John Lacey traces a pre-historic trading route across Leicestershire.

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Matthew Pennell expects the Conservatives to look to the US Republicans when devising their strategy for the next general election. The good news is he doesn't think it will work.

"For mandatory reporting to work effectively, a law needs to ensure reporting of reasonable suspicions. But the lack of any criminal penalty for non-reporting undermines both the impetus to do so, and the cover for those who want to report." Richard Scorer fears the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse may not be enough to protect children from abuse in religious settings.

"Thirteen months after first making the allegations in front of the committee, Rafiq says: “All that’s changed really is my family have been driven out of the country.” Incredibly, Lord Patel, who was hired to help Yorkshire recover from the scandal, faced so much abuse that it contributed to him leaving the UK, too." Leila Latif on the reaction to the Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report.

John Read reveals that research shows UK patients are not being told about the serious risks and limited benefits of electroconvulsive therapy.

"These books are deliberately, self-consciously challenging, in content and in form. They are also hard, beautiful, powerful, and brilliant. That account of their greatness and difficulty, especially of the way their greatness and difficulty are entwined - they are great because they are difficult, and difficult because they are great - is a story that was itself invented." Johanna Winant reminds us that last year saw the centenary of The Waste Land, Ulysses and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. 

Nicola Chester debates the pros and cons of a rural childhood.

Milton Keynes, Peter Pan, Michael Collins, The Seapoint Tragedy and James Joyce

Last night The Year is 1971 posted these TV listing from Tuesday 15 June of that year, pointing out that:

Last week saw the last of the first series of And Mother Makes Three, this Tuesday it is replaced with the start of the fourth series of Father Dear Father.

But for some reason my attention was caught by the late-night programme on Thames:

11.30 Living Architects: Lord Llewelyn-Davies

Llewelyn-Davies? Could he be related to the Llewelyn-Davies boys who were adopted by the dramatist J.M. Barrie. This was relationship depicted in the film Finding Neverland, where Barrie was played by Johnny Depp, and the BBC drama serial J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, where he was superlatively played by Ian Holm. (The whole series is on YouTube and you can buy the DVD for a few pounds.)

It turns out that Richard Llewelyn-Davies the architect was their cousin. His father and the boys' father were brothers.

That Wikipedia entry also reveals that the architectural practice founded by Lord Llewelyn-Davies was responsible for the master planning of Milton Keynes. As this involved the new city being built around the motor car, it was very much of its period.

But Richard Llewelyn-Davies' mother is more interesting than his father.

Moya Llewelyn-Davies was born Moya O'Connor, the daughter of the Irish nationalist MP James O'Connor. She was herself politically active, raising funds for Sir Roger Casement's legal defence and then campaigning for the commutation of his death sentence.

After the Easter Rising she provided a safe house for Michael Collins. It seems they became lovers, but the rumour that Collins was Richard's father was untrue.

And, as a little girl, Moya survived a dreadful calamity that destroyed her family. Choosing the Green tells the story:

John O’Connor  was a well-known journalist and Nationalist politician. He was the M.P. of West Wicklow and a family man who had a loving wife and five young children. This seemingly adoring family was torn apart when almost all of them were fatally poisoned. Only John O’Connor and one of his daughters survived.

The family story says that his children were sent to collect mussels on the seaside, but they decided to choose them from a pool closer to home instead. That pool was contaminated and when the family consumed the mussels, they were all killed. Moya, one of the daughters, did not join them for food due to a random (and lucky for her) family disagreement but O’Connor’s wife, his four other children, and one of their servants died shortly after the meal. The family is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery and their grave is massive and beautiful.

That brings us to another author of the period. The Facebook page for the cemetery says:

The Seapoint Tragedy, as it became known, shocked the people of Dublin and was spoken about for years. James Joyce, whose dad Stanislaus was at the funeral, immortalized it in his Ulysses when Bloom says: "Poor man O'Connor’s wife and five children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage."

It's a long way from Milton Keynes to Ulysses, but somewhere in here must be our Trivial Fact of the Day.

And to return to Father Dear Father, my readers may recall that its star, Patrick Cargill, was the uncle of the Surrey and England cricketer Robin Jackman.

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Sally Dawson pays tribute to Maureen Colquhoun, Britain’s first openly lesbian MP, who died earlier this month. She sat for Northampton North between February 1974 and 1979.

The coming Holyrood elections should be about the life draining from Scotland's hills and glens and the need for rewilding, argues Adam Ramsay.

"Politically speaking, Popper had lived through much. He had seen the dissolution of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He was part of the subsequent intellectual revolution that, among other things, produced the Vienna Circle, of which he was a peripheral part. He witnessed first-hand the rise of the Nazis and, with equal dismay, the rise of Communism." David Cohen remembers Karl Popper.

Caitlin Green looks at the evidence that there were people named Muhammad in medieval England.

Adam Chapman studies an apparently innocent landscape by Ronald Lampitt and finds a wealth of information about the changes to British agriculture after the second world war.

"If Leeds was somewhere to escape from then the Yorkshire Dales were somewhere to escape to. Jake Thackray’s Swaledale was similar to James Joyce’s Dublin: a quasi-magical place rooted in a real geography containing the world’s multitudes." Will Ainsley celebrates the genius of Jake Thackray.

Nancy Cunard, daughter of Bonkers Hall

Time to return to Nevill Holt, now accepted by most scholars to be the model for Bonkers Hall.

I recently received some interesting gossip from the mother of a former pupil of the prep school that used to occupy the buildings. I shall share it with you one day.

In the mean time, let me point you to a fascinating article about Nancy Cunard, who was brought up at Nevill Holt:

Nancy was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class but strongly rejected her family's values, devoting much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound, Henry Crowder, and Louis Aragon, who were among her lovers, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams.

Lord Bonkers: Yet another diary

Here is the old boy's contribution to the April Liberator. You can find an archive of these diaries on his own website.

Monday

I must apologise for my unwonted absence from these columns in February, though I was pleased to see that the amusing young people at Liberator magazine had the good sense to reprint some of my more informative diary entries – I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did. I have been gratified, too, by the cards, flowers and jars of calves’ foot jelly that have arrived by every post, and only this morning Meadowcroft brought me a pineapple from his glasshouse. As a rule I enjoy robust – even rude – health, and I have long attributed this to my mother having Nurse dip me in the Spring of Immortality that bubbles from the mountainside about the Birchcliffe Centre in Hebden Bridge when I was still an infant. Unfortunately, the silly goose held me by a part of my anatomy whilst she bathed me, with the result that nowadays it sometimes gives me gyp. You will be pleased to learn, however, that my strength is fast returning: only this morning I walked unaided to the village school to hear the children sing selections from the work of T. H. Green.

Tuesday
Whilst laid up in bed, I heard our own Dr Evan Harris on the modern wireless defending scientists’ production of chimera – or is it pronounced chimera? One never knows – that is, hybrids between man and rabbit. I am not surprised. When last helping at an election in Oxford, I noticed that the bulk of our election literature was being delivered by creatures that walked upon their hind legs and sported long floppy ears. One simply handed them a map and a bundle of leaflets, and off they went lippity, lippity. I asked Harris if there would be any problem in my getting a few of these fellows to deliver in Rutland, but he assured me that they breed like rabbits.

Wednesday

What a boon these mobile telephones are! One must, however, remember to leave them switched on. At Harrogate, for instance, I obtained a copy of Sir Menzies’s speech just as he reached the rostrum. Scanning it quickly, I found it to contain some nonsense about Gordon Brown embracing liberal democracy, with not a mention of Proportional Representation – a subject without which no speaker ever roused an audience. As he was not far into things, I naturally prepared to give him a bell and suggest some rather more suitable material. Just as I was dialling his number, the delightful Elspeth informed me that she had just told him to turn his phone off – with results that were only too clear from the following day’s newspapers.

Thursday
Quite the saddest event of the year so far has been the ending of the engagement between the delightful Sian Lloyd and our own Lembit Öpik. The Member for Montgomery, you will have read, has instead taken up with one of the Cheeky Girls, though I am not convinced that even he could say which one with any confidence. One must be wary of continually harking back to the ‘Good Old Days’, but I have to say that I cannot recall having trouble of this sort with Clement Davies and the Beverley Sisters. I am sure we all wish Miss Lloyd all the best, and I have to say that if I were her and, in the course of my meteorological researches, spied an asteroid heading for Lembit’s head, I should not mention it.

Friday
Advised by my doctor that I should not overtax my strength, I spend the day in bed, dictating letters, sending orders to Meadowcroft and so forth. Quite an exhausting day.

Saturday
I am pleased to see the Irish cricket team doing so well at the World Cup; indeed, one wonders whether poor Ed Joyce did the right thing by throwing in his lot with England rather than continue to appear for his native land. Joyce, incidentally, comes from a distinguished cricketing family. One thinks of James Joyce, who was the author of Useless (which, I must confess, I was never able to finish) and an accomplished cover point. I fear, however, that William Joyce’s achievements as a lower middle order batsman have been quite eclipsed by his treachery during the Second World War, when he earned himself the soubriquet ‘Lord Haw Haw’. (By coincidence, I was known in my younger days as ‘Lord Ha-Ha’ because of my love for landscape gardening). No such obloquy should be attached to Ed Joyce’s mother Joyce Joyce , who was for many years a mainstay of the Irish women’s team.

Sunday
And so to St Asquith’s for a Service of Thanksgiving for my recovery. People are Terribly Kind.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.