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"The judge told him he did not qualify for asylum and asked the 13-year-old to make a choice: a promise of a $3,000 stipend from the Department of Homeland Security to return to Honduras without his mother and family, or a deportation order. 'I don't know,' Angel said before beginning to cry. 'I have no one. I have nothing.' Julia Conley reports on monstrous US deportation hearings where children are given no legal representation.

Steven Beschloss thinks the Republican mid-term candidates now deserting Donald Trump have left it too late.

"Feltham was described as the most violent YOI at the time of inspection, with more than 400 assaults recorded in the previous year, including 126 involving weapons. Wetherby recorded nearly 500 assaults, although inspectors noted it held more children than Feltham or Werrington, which recorded 324 assaults." Joanne Parkes reads an HM Inspectorate of Prisons' report Children in Custody 2025/6. which concludes that standards across the youth estate remain woeful, despite some improvements at individual establishments.

"From a safe distance, the news that one of English football’s most successful clubs has been found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial irregularity, including “sham” payments totalling around £900m, may feel like so much so-what, a thicket of sporting arcana that even devoted fans occasionally struggle to parse. But, of course, the City case goes deeper than one club, one league, even one sport. Fundamentally, it is a parable of power." Jonathan Liew says the Manchester City case shows us how the global mega-rich now expect to operate with impunity.

Francis Young reviews a new biography of M.R. James: "It has been a long time coming, and eagerly awaited by many, and in this year of the 90th anniversary of James’s death, it does justice to the man and does not disappoint."

Farran Smith Nehme watches Quartet, Trio and Encore – three anthology films adapted from short stories by W. Somerset Maugham.

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Aveek Bhattacharya argues that Andy Burnham is Labour's Boris Johnson: "The two men share a tendency to be led by instinct over doctrine, a talent for building coalitions, and a rare capacity to resonate emotionally with an audience. They also share a common vulnerability: a reluctance to bring their own side bad news. Both are men for the big picture rather than nitty-gritty details, happiest channeling grievance and hope into a broad political story."

A disproportionate number of children and young people growing up in care in Scotland are dying prematurely, Yet, despite Scottish government policy, almost two-thirds of such deaths over the last five years have not been reviewed, reports Karin Goodwin.

"If I can get 15 minutes with parents and policymakers, the argument becomes much more nuanced. Parents actually breathe a sigh of relief. They can make all the decisions they want to about how tech-free or tech-full they want to be, based on their values and what they want for their family – but they don’t have to make it with this threat that it's going to lead to horrible outcomes for their children." Amelia Gentleman interviews the psychologist Candice Odgers, who is a sceptic on social media bans for teenagers.

Alan Lester looks at the politics behind arguments about the teaching of the history of the British Empire in schools. 

Ferdinand Mount writes about M.R. James, ghosts and sex.

"As the narrator lies on the doctor’s couch, revealing her thoughts in a candid, unguarded manner, a harrowing picture begins to emerge. We learn how every aspect of her life has been dictated by men, from her upbringing to her choices of husbands and the nature of their marriages to the control of her physical and mental health." JacquiWine says Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Easter is the best novel she has read this year.

Hurdy-gurdy player unveils plans to restore Norfolk's former whaling HQ

The Eastern Daily Press wins our prestigious Headline of the Day Award.

I have been asked by the judges to emphasise that they are sure the hurdy-gurdy player in question is nothing the like the vengeful ghost of a Gypsy child.

While I'm at it, the headline comes via Yahoo! because the Press has changed it to something more prosaic since the story went up.

And the music in the video, which is the very recording used in Lost Hearts, is not of a hurdy-gurdy at all. It's a variety of zither from the Vosges region of France.

Reader's voice: You don't think you're in danger of taking this feature too seriously, do you?

Has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

I've given up writing "why oh why oh why" posts about the decline of Bonfire Night and the rise of Halloween.

In part this is because, while it's rather fun to play the old fogey when you're young, it's less fun when your older. You start to fear that you really are an old fogey.

But it's also because we British seem to have found a way to adapt the reimported American Halloween so it's more to our liking. So there's lots of M.R. James but very little Casper the Friendly Ghost.

For myself, I never miss a chance to post a rendition of Carl Orff's Trees and Flowers that sounds, as I always say, like something from the soundtrack of a lost folk horror classic.

But as Halloween is behind us, we can be a little more analytical about things that go bump in the night.

In the current London Review of Books, Jon Day reviews, alongside another volume, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines.

Baines, says Day, identifies the writer Horace Walpole as the father of our modern idea of a haunted house through Stawberry Hill, "his kitschily Gothic Twickenham retreat":

Before Walpole, ghosts in English literature tended to haunt people, or generic geographic locations: crossroads, bridges, graveyards. After him, they came inside, haunting domestic spaces.

And there were socio-economic forces behind the rise of the haunted house too:

Baines’s central argument is that the rise of the haunted house in the popular imagination coincided with the emergence of the modern home as a physical and psychic reality: a building designed specifically as a dwelling, separate from farm or workplace, where a single nuclear family lived together in isolation from the rest of society. This led to a turning inward of domestic experience that is, as many historians have argued, reflected across culture more broadly. ...

Most ghosts, in the UK and America at least, are still domestically coded. Gruesome ghosts and body horror are rare. Instead there are female spectres who walk the same paths night after night searching for lost loves, or dead children who peer unnervingly through windows. Poltergeists are a relatively recent addition to the haunted house pantheon, only really gaining ground in the second half of the 20th century (and exploding in popularity after The Exorcist was released in 1973). 

Unlike fully embodied ghosts, which tend to favour grander backdrops, they often attach themselves to "dysfunctional, disenfranchised or otherwise unhappy families", Baines writes, so that parapsychic researchers and ghost historians sometimes call them "council house ghosts". 

This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a "young, emotionally volatile female family member" – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might themselves be responsible for the reported hauntings). 

But as Baines sees it, lack of ownership is also a significant factor in ‘purported haunted house cases, with people living in borrowed or rented houses tending not to properly “bond” with their place of residence, causing them to feel perpetually ill at ease’. If you’re more likely to be haunted if you rent than if you own, has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?

There's more about How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines on the Profile Books website.

Wits in Felixstowe: The genesis of Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad

Filmed at King's College, Cambridge, and on the Suffolk coast, Wits in Felixstowe looks at the genesis, influences and setting of M.R. James's famous story Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.

Writer and presenter Robert Lloyd Parry takes a fresh look at James’s character. He finds, behind the academic and bibliophile, a man surrounded by diverse and intriguing friends: the millionaire Liberal Felix Cobbold, the prolific essayist Arthur Benson and the tragic publisher, poet and Ripper suspect J.K. Stephen.

As seen on TV: Charles Dickens's short story The Signal-Man

After five M.R. James adaptations, in 1976 the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas turned to Dickens and an unforgettable version of The Signal-Man.

This story is the subject of a good episode of the podcast Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! Though it's only 10 or 11 pages long, Dominic Gerrard and John Bowen find it inexhaustible.

You can read it for yourself on Project Gutenberg. And for more on premotions, I strongly recommend Sam Knight's The Premonitions Bureau.

The inspiration for Mr Brownlow was himself a foundling, just like Oliver Twist

When I published a book chapter on Charles Dickens and antisemitism a couple of years ago, I managed to slip in the expression 'well-behaved orphans'. But it turns out that the original Well-Behaved Orphan wasn't Oliver Twist but his benefactor, Mr Brownlow.

For the Wikipedia entry for Mr Brownlow says:

Mr Brownlow's name and character generally believed to be derived from John Brownlow, the director of the Foundling Hospital, which was dedicated to looking after abandoned and unwanted children. Dickens, a regular visitor to the hospital, knew Brownlow well. 

Dickens scholar Robert Alan Colby argues that "in naming Oliver's benefactor Mr Brownlow, Dickens seems to have been paying a tribute to one of the most dedicated social servants of his age".

The Foundling Hospital mentioned here is the one in Bloomsbury founded by Thomas Coram in 1739.

And, fascinatingly there is more about Mr Brownlow:

In 1831, seven years before Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, John Brownlow had written a novel about an orphan called Hans Sloane - a Tale, which has a plot broadly similar to Dickens's later work. Several critics have suggested that Dickens took aspects of the basic plot of his novel from Brownlow's earlier work, so the name may have been a tribute for two reasons.

Look up John Brownlow and you soon find Roy Sloan's History Hamper blog:

John Brownlow was the most famous and esteemed servant of the Foundling Hospital in the more than two centuries of its existence, from the opening of its doors in 1741 to final closure in 1954. He was himself a foundling. The son of Mary Goodacre, he was admitted on 9 August 1800 at the age of three months and given his new name and a number, 18,607. 

Like all of the foundlings, he spent his early years with a foster family (that of Mary Skinner of Hadlow, Kent) before being returned to the Hospital.  In 1814, instead of leaving to be apprenticed to an employer, he was taken into the Secretary’s office as a clerk, an arrangement that was formalised in 1817.  This was possibly an acknowledgement of his exceptional ability, although the formal register says ‘Invalided 18 June 1817’. 

He was promoted to Treasurer’s Clerk in 1828 and became Secretary, in charge of the day-to-day running of the institution, in 1849.  He was with the Hospital almost from cradle to grave, retiring in 1872 just a year before his death in August 1873.

While we're talking about Mr Brownlow, here are a couple of pieces of trivia connected with his appearance on the cinema screen.

First, in David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, Brownlow was played by the actor Henry Stephenson. He was born in 1871, which was the year after Charles Dickens died.

Second, in the BBC 'Ghost Story for Christmas' adaptation of M.R. James's short story Lost Hearts, the evil Mr Abney, who takes in a young orphan boy out of apparent benevolence but really out of a wish to consume his heart in pursuit of eternal life, is played by Joseph O'Conor. And Joseph O'Conor played Mr Brownlow in the 1968 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver.

G.K. Chesterton once said that Dickens' characters would soothe their optimistic creator with something less terrible than the truth. Could it be that Mr Brownlow was guilty of that too?

More than 800 episodes of Doctor Who available on BBC iPlayer

My Doctor was Jon Pertwee, though Roger Delgado as The Master and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier did just as much to make those years special.

To celebrate the show's 60th birthday, the BBC has put every Doctor Who episode it can  - more than 800 - and many other related programmes on iPlayer.

Though I fully approved of the show's revival in 2005, I rarely watch it. Perhaps, with its talk of 'story arcs' and 'showrunners', I feel has it has its devoted adult fans too much in mind.

So if you click on the image above you will be taken to the the first of the five episodes of the 1971 story The Daemons.

With is flavours of folk horror, M.R. James and Dennis Wheatley, The Daemons is very 1971 indeed.

And I have another reason for liking it. The Daemons was filmed at Aldbourne in Wiltshire, and in September 1996 I gave the Richard Jefferies Society Birthday Lecture in that village's Memorial Hall.

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Jack Haines says that as we see the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic hit our society harder than ever before, it is essential for Liberal Democrats to be pioneering and spearheading the charge towards making basic income a reality.

"The reason the Department hasn’t done the simplest, cheapest thing and just give parents a bit of extra cash is because they don’t trust them to spend it properly. Or rather they are scared of the public perception that, as Tory MP Ben Bradley luridly put it last year, the money would be spent in crack dens and brothels." Sam Freedman says myths about poverty must be refuted so that parents are trusted with £20 and not half a pepper.

Christian Kerr asks if the appointment of Josh MacAlister as chair of the independent review of children’s social care in England means its conclusions are a foregone conclusion.

"This is a story about secrecy, obfuscation and political embarrassment at the heart of government. It revolves around an attempt by the Home Office to withhold vital research evidence about the causes of serious violence - a decision the department clung to, even though it undermined the credibility of its flagship plan to tackle the problem. It ended in a three-year legal battle that cost taxpayers thousands of pounds." Danny Shaw takes on the Home Office.

"James in his letters is a real human being, we see him go from a small boy of seven to a junior schoolboy, to Eton and then Kings College Cambridge and all of his life in between and after it is wonderful and very humbling, to be privy to this." Jane Mainley-Piddock is interviewed about her forthcoming book, Casting the Runes: The Letters of M. R. James.

Mark Shirley introduces us to the Leicester variant of table skittles.

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Timothy Garton Ash offers his manifesto for a renewal of liberalism: "At its best, liberalism has always understood that human beings never are what Jeremy Waldron has called the 'self-made atoms of liberal fantasy,' but rather live embedded in multiple kinds of community that speak to deep psychological needs for belonging and recognition."

"The most surprising feature of Britain since the Brexit referendum is just how unhappy Brexiters have been." Chris Grey probes the psychology of the Brexit ultras.

Should we have to respect or just tolerate abhorrent views? Ruth Smeeth on a debate in academia.

Nick Hunt reviews The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes: "There’s an often surreal contrast between the chocolate-box perfection of the places he encounters - the quintessence of mannered, civilised Englishness - and the ever-present threat of being apprehended."

"Unlike the ghosts of M.R. James, whose creations could probably be best avoided by following the advice 'Put the thing back where you found it', Dickens deals in a different type of phantom. ... Dickens’ ghosts are not as concerned with things like retribution, justice or punishment as they are with making sure the inevitable comes to pass." Paul Childs explores The Signalman, the 1976 episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas adapted from a story by Charles Dickens.

Moonbrook Cottage searches for the lost Shropshire village of Hangsters Gate.

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"It didn’t matter if many of the voices expressing these opinions online were paid for by multiple accounts, boosted by dark digital analytics, or indeed often outright replicants run by troll farms hosted and funded by hostile foreign countries. If the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations were people, why not networks of bots and troll armies?" Peter Jukes explains the rise and fall of the dark money and online culture war strategies that put Donald Trump in the White House and pushed Britain out of the EU.

Vince Cable looks at what may happen to British farming after Brexit.

"The UK is the only country in Europe that still has formal public exams at 16. Of course, it made sense when the majority of young people left school at 16, as the results helped them find a pathway into work or into the next stage of education. However, today, between the ages of 16 and 18, all young people have to be in education or work-based training." Mary Reid calls for GCSEs to be scrapped.

Sarah Coomer looks back to Christmas Day 1973 and the BBC's adaptation of M.R. James's ghost story Lost Hearts: "Stephen, played by Simon Gipps Kent, an actor who was fated himself never to see his thirties, has a refreshingly realistic lack of agency as opposed to the oft-seen ass-kicking young hero - he is entirely at the mercy of the adult world he is forced to encounter so prematurely."

A London Inheritance visits the Post Office underground railway that used to hurry the mail between London sorting offices and railway termini.

A Netflix documentary tells the story of a miraculous cat sanctuary on the Greek island of Syros, reports Patricia Claus.

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A new kind of community politics - ‘flatpack democracy’ - has emerged in towns left to fend for themselves by the centre, reports John Harris.

Seth Thevoz is interviewed on the podcast The Making of a Historian about the role of clubs in 19th-century British politics.

Hearing voices can be frightening and isolating, but Bryony Sheaves says talking can help.

"Shot on location in London, The Long Good Friday explores a mixture of luxurious and post-industrial settings, but most vitally it is a last document of the docklands around the Thames before the developers – as dramatised in the film – bought the land to make way for the more monolithic towers that line the river today." Adam Scovell explores the film's locations 40 years on.

"Dickens’ genius was to wed the gothic with the sentimental, using stories of ghosts and goblins to reaffirm "basic bourgeois values; as the tradition evolved, however, other writers were less wedded to this social vision, preferring the simply scary. In Henry James’s famous gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw, the frame story involves a group of men sitting around the fire telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve - setting off a story of pure terror, without any pretension to charity or sentimentality." Colin Dickey calls for a revival of the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas.

Southwark Cathedral held for its cat - and quite right too: "I began by saying that she was her own cat and all attempts to make her a cosy cat failed.  She wasn’t interested in being cuddled or stroked, but she was interested in being here in her place of safety, especially after the terrorist attack which put her off ever going out of this sanctuary again."

Dramarama: Snap (1987)

Dramarama was an ITV series of one-off plays for children. Each had a science fiction or supernatural theme. After a one-off programme was shown in 1982, it ran to seven seasons between 1983 and 1989.

The genuinely unsettling Snap, with its echoes of M.R. James and Romney Marsh locations, was shown in 1987.

A Ghost Story for Christmas: Martin's Close

Good news this week: Mark Gatiss has adapted another of M.R. James's ghost stories for television.

Martin’s Close will be shown by the BBC at Christmas, starring Peter Capaldi.

In 2013 Gatiss revived the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas, which was a real seasonal event back in the 1970s, by adapting James's The Tractate Middoth.

It was a good piece of work, even if for me it was overshadowed by his superb documentary on the life of James, which was shown the same week.

If you want to know more about Martin's Close, A Podcast for the Curious is your friend.

They also produced the video above, which takes you to the real-life location of the story.

A psychologist on M.R. James

"There is something that interests me as a psychologist and that is why the ghost stories had such a lasting influence. Why is it that we just love to be frightened?”

Professor Uta Frith is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Here she delves into the origins of James’s unsettling stories and what they reveal about our love of a good scare.

If you are interested in developmental psychology, I recommend you follow Uta Frith on Twitter.

And if you like M.R. James's ghost stories there is A Podcast to the Curious.

GUEST POST Forgotten Victorian folklore collectors: An undiscovered treasure trove

Francis Young on the rediscovery of forgotten riches.

Collecting folklore was all the rage in Victorian England. Although there were occasional collectors of ‘popular antiquities’ in the 17th and 18th centuries (John Aubrey is perhaps the most famous example), it was not until after William Thoms coined the word ‘folklore’ in 1846 that books dedicated to folk beliefs, stories and customs became popular.

 The foundation of the Folklore Society in 1878 inaugurated the golden age of English folklore collection, which lasted up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. As the progress of technological innovation and social change intensified, so too did fascination with England’s vanishing rural lore. Folklore collection was an activist form of nostalgia which engaged the interest of everyone from learned scholars and dilettantish amateurs to hack journalists and the proprietors of local newspapers.

The Victorian folklore collectors were a strikingly diverse group, compared with authors of other kinds of literature. The Folklore Society struggled hard to turn folklore into an academic discipline, even a ‘science’, but this effort has never really succeeded.

Folklore remained (and, to a large extent, remains to this day) the domain of enthusiastic amateurs of all social classes. Some folklorists were aristocrats or members of the landed gentry, who sought to gather up the folklore of their tenants from a great height. But one of the earliest serious collectors of local folklore was the poet John Clare, who began life as a rural labourer in Northamptonshire like the people whose songs and stories he collected.

Furthermore, many of the early folklore collectors were women, since the recording of traditional lore was a form of writing considered acceptable for female authors. These folklore collectors gathered stories from other women, producing a form of literature that almost uniquely gave voices to rural working class women.

The work of many Victorian folklore collectors, especially those who were working class or female, remains obscure. Less well-off or well-connected folklorists struggled to get their writing into print, or were only published in local newspapers. Others fell victim to publishers who did not understand how to market or promote books about folklore, or to journalistic plagiarists who appropriated the hard work of folklore collectors as their own.

The first obscure Victorian folklorist whom I had the privilege of bringing to light was Charles Dack (1847–c. 1920), a self-taught railway clerk who became volunteer curator of Peterborough Museum. Dack was able to get a few articles and short pamphlets published, but he simply did not have the financial resources to publish a larger work on the folklore of the Soke of Peterborough.

Some of Dack’s papers were later acquired by Cambridge University Library, and I relied heavily on these to produce my book Peterborough Folklore (shortlisted for the 2018 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award), which is largely a tribute to Dack’s fieldwork.

My book Suffolk Fairylore, published in 2018, similarly sought to excavate the work of some forgotten folklorists, notably the sisters Anna and Lois Fison, who were responsible for recording three folktales they heard from their old nurse in Barningham, Suffolk growing up in the 1830s: ‘Brother Mike’, ‘Cap o’Rushes’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’.

A leading member of the Folklore Society, Edward Clodd, soon muscled in and reported ‘Tom Tit Tot’ without attribution to the Fisons; Clodd brought the tale to the attention of European folklorists, and although he later apologised to the Fison sisters, their role as the original collectors of the tales was often erased in subsequent folklore studies.

Another woman folklorist who suffered plagiarism was Margaret Helen James (1859–1938), a figure so obscure that her identity was not known until 2017. James was a cousin of the famous writer of ghost stories M.R. James. She published only one book, Bogie Tales of East Anglia (1891), a folklore collection that rapidly became very scarce but was extensively plagiarised by a journalist, Morley Adams, in 1914.

Margaret James’s Bogie Tales was the earliest book dedicated to the folklore of East Anglia, but her contribution has been entirely overlooked until now because her identity was unknown and much of the folklore she collected has been attributed to Morley Adams. I have recently edited Margaret James’s book, with a critical introduction and notes, so that it can finally be made widely available.

The 19th century’s regional folklorists were remarkable individuals – dedicated, eclectic in their interests, often eccentric and sometimes self-taught. Their writings, both published and unpublished, often remain a treasure-trove still to be uncovered.

The digitisation of local newspapers and Victorian pamphlets, making them searchable, is bringing much lost folklore recording to light, and we are currently living through a golden age of folklore research – not because there is still traditional folklore to be collected (in most cases there is not), but because folklore collected over a hundred years ago is finally emerging from the shadows.

Read more from Francis Young on his website.

M.R. James goes to the Glee Club

Embed from Getty Images

It's a while since I have been to Liberal Democrat Conference. In the days when I did, one of the pleasures of the Glee Club was the song Woad.

You know it:

Romans keep your armours;
Saxons your pyjamas:
Hairy coats were meant for goats,
Gorillas, yaks, retriever dogs and llamas.

Tramp up Snowdon with our woad on:
Never mind if we get rained or blowed on.
Never want a button sewed on.
Go it, Ancient Bs.  

Woad was written some time before 1914 by William Hope-Jones, a housemaster at Eton, for the school's Scout troop. It became popular in the Scouting movement in the 1920s.

The Provost of Eton in that era was M.R. James, the famous writer of ghost stories.

James also wrote for the school Scout troop. Knowing his audience, he made his story Wailing Well gruesome and included caricatures of some of the masters at the school.

One of those caricatures was of William Hope-Jones.

You can hear Wailing Well discussed in an episode of the excellent A Podcast to the Curious, which is devoted to James's works.

M.R. James's ghost stories as a graphic novel

John Reppion and Leah Moore discuss Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, their comic book adaptation of four of M.R. James's supernatural tales.

If you like James's work, you will love A Podcast to the Curious.

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"I’m still not convinced that he was particularly brilliant in the successful campaign in 2010 ... He faced a still toxic Tory party and a Labour party that was weary and run down after over a decade in government, and still managed to lose seats." William Barter offers a reappraisal of Nick Clegg.

Steve Peers looks at the threat to workers' rights after Brexit.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft discusses the career of Conor Cruise O’Brien on the centenary of his birth.

Christmas Day 1977 marked the beginning of the end of an era for British light entertainment, argues Curious British Telly.

Mark Gatiss talks to Shadows at the Door about Doctor Who, M.R. James and horror films: "I'm actually more interested in modern horror; the gothic but in a modern context. I don't think it has to be about the old and obviously I still love it but it doesn't have to be about candelabra and castles. You can get the same feeling from modern methods, and in a way that is more frightening."

"Khodarkovsky estimates that about half of the players who show remarkable skill before the age of 10 will give up on chess entirely. And he blames, at least in part, the attention we shower on prodigies." David Hill finds that chess prodigies are getting younger.

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In a thoughtful post, Mark Mills reminds us that there can be pessimistic liberals as well as optimistic ones.

Matthew d'Ancona puts his finger on Labour's problem: "It is New Labour, or what remains of it, that needs to admit its faults, dismantle itself and rebuild from scratch."

"By the Victorian era, however, the formality of cat funerals had increased substantially. Bereaved pet owners commissioned undertakers to build elaborate cat caskets. Clergymen performed cat burial services. And stone masons chiseled cat names on cat headstones." Mimi Matthews on a forgotten corner of social history.

London was once powered by a vast underground hydraulic system, explains Andy Emmerson.

Tess Reidy shows us what happens to night clubs after they close down.

Adam Covell explores the landscape of M.R. James' A Warning to the Curious.