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Alexandra Hall Hall lists 10 things Britain could do if it really cared about Palestinians.

"If this plan is about prevention, then nature should be central to it. The science is unequivocal: contact with the natural world supports human health in wide ranging and profound ways. It lowers stress, improves mood, and alleviates symptoms of anxiety." Andrea Mechelli et al. argue that there is a striking omission from the NHS's 10-year plan.

"I recently wrote an article for the Telegraph about a series of unexplained electrical substation fires across the country. There had been eight in the space of a few weeks between March and mid May, when normally you might expect one or two every few years." Coincidence or enemy action? Jonathan Ford investigates.

Henry Jeffreys has the latest on the Unbound scandal: "Pete Brown, Britain’s best-known beer writer, said: 'I don’t think I got a single UK review or mention anywhere apart from those I generated myself. It was then that I realised the model gave Unbound absolutely no incentive to try to sell a book post-publication.'"

"In late May he secured an incredible coup over Caroline’s chief advisor, the Whig MP Henry Brougham, who was trying to negotiate a behind-closed doors settlement. Instead, Wood met Caroline in Calais and convinced her to return from exile, take up residence in his London home and from there claim the right to be crowned Queen of the United Kingdom." Martin Spychal on Matthew Wood, who took up the cause of Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of George IV.

B.D. McClay speaks up for her favourite Jane Austen novel: "It’s not my intention to turn Northanger Abbey from a gleeful romp into a treatise on human judgment. It is a light novel – Austen’s lightest – and that lightness should be burdened as little as possible through overthinking it. Nevertheless, at risk of weightiness, it’s worth exploring how Northanger Abbey is more than a satire of other novels. Managing disastrous first impressions, discerning the sincerity of another’s intentions, seeing into somebody’s character: these are all here, explored in just as nuanced a way as they will be in Emma or Pride and Prejudice."

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Josh Self has some good news - Reform UK’s civil war will be a protracted farce: "[Rupert] Lowe’s substantial online presence will ensure every aspect of this row is played out in public. That means recurrent poor headlines for Reform - as an array of significant political milestones await."

"As of 1900, about 18 per cent, or nearly one in five, American children died before their fifth birthday. The most common causes were infectious diseases - pneumonia, diphtheria, dysentery, measles, and other illnesses ran rampant through households, and children were especially at risk." Anna North reminds us of what life was like before vaccines.

"The four-part docudrama follows a group of mothers in Corby as they fight for justice after 19 of their children were born with birth defects caused by exposure to toxic waste – the result of the botched regeneration of the town’s former steelworks site." Lee Barron, the town's Labour MP, reviews Toxic Town.

Victoria Guida argues that crypto may be its own worse enemy: "Factions within the industry are battling with each other for strategic, commercial and ideological reasons."

"The film’s title is aptly overdetermined. Reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) is obviously one kind of performer. But performer, in British slang, also refers to mobsters like Chas (James Fox). In the film, the worlds that these two men inhabit collide and entwine in fascinating fashion." Bud Wilkins reviews of a new Blu-Ray release of Performance.

Lizza Aiken praises the sequels to Jane Austen's novels that Joan Aiken wrote.

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Vince Cable gives it both barrels: "Our secular and liberal values; our diverse society; our democratically elected government. All are antithetical to the Trump clan. We need to understand that the sentimental nonsense about the special relationship is over. We are under attack."

 "Trump’s potential kompromat combines with his cultural-political alignment with kleptocracy and dictatorship that makes him a Russian agent of influence. This was played out in ghastly detail in the 28 February meeting in the White House. In considering our response to America’s abandonment of the West, we need to be realistic about its leadership." Arthur Snell says it's time to take a serious look at the evidence of Trump's relationship with Russia.

Mark Pack reviews Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.

Kate Bradbury sets out what we can do to help bumblebees: "If you don’t have a greenhouse, do you have space for a pot of winter heather? Can you use your conservatory, porch or other covered space to grow crocuses? Can you dedicate a space in which bumblebees might make a nest?"

"When asked by the Bench chairman if they had anything to say, the taller woman said they did not approve of this court, as there was no woman there to try them. They were remanded for a week while efforts were made to identify them." Jill Evans on a 'Suffragette outrage; at Cheltenham in 1913.

"I was astonished: here was drama, humour, satire and wit in abundance, here too I learnt social history and observed sharp psychological insights." Chris Lovegrove won't have Jane Austen's novels called mimsy, tedious and woke.

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"There’s been a fair bit of discussion about Lib Dem housing policies and our record recently. It’s become obvious to me that many members, especially Young Liberals, don’t appear to know what our national housing policy is, or our track record." Mattthew Pennell sets out some of the housing achievements of local authorities run by the party.

George Llewelyn makes an unexpected discovery: "More interesting perhaps is the change in mood from the Brexit voters I spoke to in 2021. Many of them have graduated from Eurosceptics with a general dissatisfaction at how things turned out to becoming ardent rejoiners themselves."

Our suspicion of anyone who expresses the ambition to be a politician is one of the reasons for the poor quality of our MPs, says Adam Hawksbee.

Emma Fergusson, Shona Reed-Purvis and Lucy Foulkes argue that "some young people’s emotional and behavioural difficulties are now too readily being viewed as problems that require (and require only) medical intervention, typically in the form of assessment and one-to-one treatment from a mental health professional."

"These Spiritual Defenders of the game stood, using the theatrical backdrop and the powerfully echoing acoustics of their private cricketing palace to bray and honk like entitled asses." Emma John on the behaviour of MCC members on Sunday.

John Walsh remembers Martin Amis: "Although he was seen, by some critics of his first three novels, as a sex-obsessed snake in the garden of fiction, he was also the most self-consciously literary of writers. The names (or allusions to the works) of D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, Gerald Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman and William Shakespeare are all dropped in the first thirty pages of The Rachel Papers. By page 60, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Jane Austen, George Herbert and Franz Kafka had also been press-ganged into the action."

Exploring Jane Austen’s Worthing with John Rogers

John abandons London - the capital city of psychogeography - to explore a Sussex resort with the author Travis Elborough.

As he explains on YouTube:

Our walk starts at Worthing Station and then heads down into the heart of the Town Centre. We are looking for sites associated with Jane Austen who stayed in Worthing in 1805 and used it as the setting for her unfinished novel Sanditon. This is based on one of the chapters in Travis Elborough's latest book The Writer's Journey (White Lion Publishing). https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-.... 

The locations visited include: the Connaught Theatre; Stanford Cottage (where Jane Austen stayed in 1805); the Dome Cinema, as featured in the 1987 film Wish You Were Here starring Emily Lloyd and Tom Bell; the Royal Arcade; Shelley House; and Worthing Pier.

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

White supremacist sentenced to read Pride and Prejudice and other literary classics

Thanks to a nomination from a reader, the Leicester Mercury wins today's Headline of the Day Award.

And the story beneath it is worth reading too:

A young Nazi sympathizer who downloaded bomb-making instructions has been sentenced to read classic novels including Pride and Prejudice instead.

Judge Timothy Spencer QC told Ben John, 21, he could stay out of prison as long as he steered clear of white-supremacy literature and and read books and plays by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.

The former De Montfort University student will have to return to court every four months to be tested on his reading by the judge after avoiding jail "by the skin of his teeth".

You wonder if a young Muslim facing similar charges would have got off with a reading list of postcolonial literature, but I'm all for keeping young people out of prison if at all possible.

The idea that encountering great art makes you a better person is deeply unfashionable, though it lies at the heart of Alexei Sayle's novel Overtaken. But anything is better than reading Nazi literature.

For myself, I have never made it past the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice, but I did enjoy Northanger Abbey.

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Iain Brodie Brown on a gap in modern Liberal thinking: "For decades, in the post-war era, there was not a budget day when the Liberal Party did not move an amendment to promote employee ownership and industrial democracy."

"It is far more likely that leave voters will accept the proposition that they were fooled by politicians - as indeed they were – than that they fooled themselves." Chris Grey considers whether public opinion will turn against Brexit.

Frances Coppola summons the aid of Jane Austen to explain the amazing conversion of James Dyson on Europe.

Matthew Scott argues that Rolf Harris should have been given a retrial.

If we are to understand Douglas Jardine, the most divisive and controversial cricketer who ever played for England, we must understand his Scottishness, says Alex Massie.

"Although the Valley Works had been devoted to producing such nightmarish weapons, the site seemed so oddly normal ....  Had I not known the history of the site, all I would have seen would be a collection of decaying industrial buildings gradually being swallowed up once more by nature." Bobby Seal discovers Mendelssohn, mustard gas and memory in the Alyn Valley.

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"This video toolkit is intended to help you debunk dubious tweets. It was first developed in research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Arena Program at the London School of Economics to detect Russian social media influence during the German elections." Henk Van Ess shows us how to spot a bot.

Daniel Sugarman says the row about antisemitism is bad for the Labour Party and for everyone else.

"The contrast of metropolitan gangsterism with rural comfort has always made it an irresistible tale – it was a bit like a really lovely Welsh Breaking Bad." Joe Zadeh revisits the landscape of Operation Julie - Britain's largest ever drugs bust.

Ray King explains why you should visit Manchester Town Hall before it closes for renovation early next year.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell reviews a clutch of recent books on Jane Austen: ""hat appears on the new £10 bill is not an authentic image of Austen but a prettified, Victorian version first circulated by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh."

You can listen to the 1976 Desert Island Discs appearance by Christopher Milne (Winnie the Pooh's Christopher Robin) on the BBC iPlayer. His choice of book is Bevis by Richard Jefferies.

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Activist Post explains why 500 innocent Americans are shot dead by the police each year.

It is completely unacceptable for children to be placed in adult mental health wards, says Aled  Roberts on Freedom Central.

Matthew Taylor (not the former Lib Dem MP) passes on two accounts of the baleful effect of the current inspection regime for schools: "Understand that any sixth form discussion of a complex topic, which lasted longer than a few minutes, would be graded as unsatisfactory, because the boxes could not be ticked for the inspector."

"I see the current small, but growing, community of archaeological bloggers as so many militant moles who are mining away at the foundations of those loathsome ivory towers that were erected in the ‘50s and 60s to keep our fascinating subject above and beyond the aspirations of ordinary people. Who knows, but with luck we’ll soon bring them crashing to the ground." The mighty Francis Pryor makes his contribution to the archaeology blogging festival.

"Decorations were hung on Christmas Eve (it was considered unlucky to bring greenery into the house before Christmas)." The Jane Austen Giftshop tells us about Christmas in the old girl's day.

John McGowan, on Discursive of Tunbridge Wells, celebrates the work of the writer and illustrator Shirley Hughes: "Hughes is as accurate a witness to childhood as any psychologist, and it’s this quality that characterises the greatest children’s fiction."