Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and our Trivial Fact of the Day

E.W. Hornung, the author of the Raffles stories, was married to Arthur Conan Doyle's sister.

I learnt this from the latest episode of Shedunnit - a podcast I would recommend to anyone who enjoys crime fiction.

Boris Johnson to speak at the model for Bonkers Hall - and opera singers are up in arms

Boris Johnson is to appear at the Nevill Holt Festival in conversation with Andrew Roberts on 14 June. 

And you will be aware that it's a rare scholar now who denies that Nevill Holt Hall is the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.*

Thanks to the great Solar Pilchard on Bluesky, I find that this news has gone down badly with the nation's opera singers.

A cutting from Van Magazine runs:

Sudden Holt

Opera professionals were already pretty angry with the country house opera company Nevill Holt, which a few years ago made the rather sudden switch from supporting opera to a wider festival of music and arts, leaving singers and other professionals in the lurch. 

So when former prime minister Boris Johnson was announced as a guest speaker at the Summer's Festival - someone who oversaw a rough Covid for the opera sector, to say the least - many were furious. Ashley Beauchamp, a former head of music at Nevill Holt. had the following to say in the Instagram comets section:

Nevill Holt 2023: "Championing emerging talent continues to lie at the heart of Nevil halts ambitions across all strands of the festival's work."

Nevill Holt 2025: 🙃🙃🙃

I shall leave the final words to my mother, who would have been 94 on the day of Johnson and Roberts's event:

"You can't have a prime minister called 'Boris'.  

* Though you can add Rockingham Castle and East Langton Grange at least to the mix.

Responsible Child: When the facts comes before the drama

The success of the Netflix series Adolescence, and my doubts as to how far it reflects reality, has put me in mind of the BBC television play Responsible Child from 2019. This showed how the legal system deals with a 12-year-boy who has helped his older brother murder their abusive stepfather.

Responsible Child was the first play directed by the BAFTA-winning documentary maker Nick Holt, who was interviewed at the time by Deadline:

Tell me how Responsible Child came about.

I was up in Scotland making The Murder Trial, probably for about 18 months in total, looking at various cases, and it was whilst I was up there that I saw a very young child, and I asked one of the lawyers, “Was that a witness?” She was incredibly young to be in a courtroom. And the sister of the accused, said, “No, actually that’s the accused.” 

I was quite taken aback by that. This child doesn’t look older than 10. And then I was told that actually, yes, there are trials for children of 10. And they’re put on trial as adults and they’re put on trial in front of juries, and they’re not part of the youth courts.

Then Holt came across the case of  Jerome and Joshua Ellis, who were 14 and 23 when they also killed their stepfather. The case was reported because the press overturned an injunction that banned them from naming either brother to protect the younger's anonymity:

And that’s what led me to being able to go to a trial and see one of these. It was extraordinary to see, and then I became very close to a legal team involved in that case, and started understanding all about what it’s like to work on these cases, what it’s like to work with young accused.

And he later says:

I’m no stranger to sitting through murder trials. I’ve sat through a great many in my time. But there was just something extraordinary seeing the focus of the entire room on a small child. There was just something so potent about the image of a child who could barely see over the witness stand, and subjected to examination, cross-examination.

And of course, you wonder about children, in general, is how much do they understand about what’s going on. How much of the case they understand, how much do they understand of what they’re saying, the consequences of what they’re saying, what’s being really asked for in what they’re saying? It’s an incredibly stressful situation and so, yes, it was extraordinary to see it first hand.

Holt also says that he told his story through a drama rather than a documentary because that's the only way you can bring one of these trials to the screen,

Responsible Child was screened just before Christmas 2019. It was widely praised and nominated for a BAFTA.

Then came the International Emmys. The play won its category and, remarkably, its young lead Billy Barratt* won Best Actor for a performance that was filmed just after this 12th birthday.  But even this was not enough to win Responsible Child a repeat.

* Trivia fans will be pleased to learn that Billy Barratt is the grandson of Shakin' Stevens (whose real name is Michael Barratt).

Prime minister's questions: Have the Tories given up?

Kemi Badenoch has a problem at prime minister's questions. Every time she attacks Labour on the economy, Keir Starmer simply has to hang the record of the last Conservative government round her neck to win the exchange.

But she has another, as the Guardian live politics blog pointed out. She lacks support from her own side of the House:

Towards the end of the session Greg Smith asked a question that backed up the Badenoch “jobs tax” critique. ... On its own, a single question like this is unlikely to make much impression. But half a dozen of them might.

(To be fair to the Tories, they did not get half a dozen backbench questions. They just got three, and the other two were devoted to Scunthorpe steelworks and the child killer Colin Pitchfork. There is a lottery to decide who gets called at PMQs, and maybe the Conservatives were just unlucky in their allocation this week. But maybe some of them are not bothering to bid for a question. In total just four Tory MPs spoke at PMQs today – exactly the same as the number of Liberal Democrats who got a question.)

You can get strange results from lotteries: the Tories did remarkably badly in the ballot for private member's bills held when the new parliament met after last year's general election.

But this lack of backbench questions may be a sign that the Tories have already written Kemi Badenoch off. Or it could be a sign they are simply demoralised. Or a sign they are too busy on Twitter reading the latest conspiracy theory from Elon Musk.

Whatever the reason for the Tories' lack of interest, it is telling that Josh Self chose to focus his piece about today's PMQs on the exchange between Starmer and Ed Davey on Trump and tariffs - and called it for Ed.

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"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

It's not teenage boys who form corrosive opinions because of social media: it's Kemi Badenoch

Embed from Getty Images

Kemi Badenoch doesn't have time to watch television, she told, Nick Ferrari this morning, but she does know one thing about Adolescence:

"The story which it is based on has been fundamentally changed, and so creating policy on a work of fiction rather than reality is the real issue."

She's referring to a story that has been spread widely by right-wingers on social media, which maintains that the Netflix series Adolescence is based on a real case where a black boy stabbed a white girl.

The race of the boy was changed, the story runs, because of wokeness - or perhaps a global conspiracy involving George Soros, Bill Gates and Gary Lineker.

But this story, like many you find on social media, isn't true.

Here's Jack Thorne, who wrote the screenplay for Adolescence, in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago:

At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: "I think you should look into 'incel' culture."

So the series wasn't written to expose incel culture: it was used as a plot device to develop an intriguing situation.

This is the reason I've been a little worried by the impact that Adolescence has had. Do we know it presented a true picture? Or is there an element of moral panic about a new means young people have found of enjoying themselves?

In fact, this seems to be what Badenoch was trying to get over. But, as ever, her tone was petulant and unpleasant - as though she resented anyone questioning her at all. And she topped her comments with a big fat cherry of a baseless conspiracy theory.

So while I'm not sure whether we should worry so much about the way social media affects teenage boys, I'm certain we should worry about the way it has affected Kemi Badenoch.

The Nicotines: Mary Wana

This was on a Q Magazine sampler disc back in 1997 and I still think of it.

Pair of beavers released on the River Clun in Shropshire

BBC News reports:

Beavers have returned to a Shropshire river for the first time in 400 years.

The Severn Rivers Trust introduced a pair to the River Clun in the south of the county on Monday afternoon.

It hopes the pair will have offspring and can help transform the natural environment through their dam building.

The beavers have been released into an enclosure, but the story quotes Joe Pimblett, the chief executive of the Severn Rivers Trust

"If you're a nature lover and you've got an interest in the rural environment this is huge, this could be the precursor to beavers living here naturally in Shropshire."

The Clun rises near the hamlet of Anchor, close to the border with Wales. It flows east through the little town of Clun, before turnings south and joining the Teme just over the Herefordshire border in Leintwardine.

My photo shows the medieval bridge over the River Clun in the town on Clun.

The Lib Dems should terrify the Tories

That's the headline on George Eaton's New Statesman piece on the Liberal Democrats' ambitions for May's local elections - and he's not talking about Lord Bonkers' tactic of lurking outside rural polling stations in his gorilla suit.

Eaton has been talking to party "strategists"  - the insiders must have been taking a rare day off. 

He tells us they:

speak of "Project 312" - the number of councillors held by the Tories in seats they lost or narrowly won at the general election

He set's these forthcoming local elections against the results of the last general election:

At the last election, the Blue Wall was battered rather than toppled - but it could be next time. Of the Lib Dems’ 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories (and would fall with a swing of 8.8 points).

What puzzles Eaton is the Conservatives lack of concern at the Lib Dem threat. Last year the Conservatives lost 12 times as many seats to the Lib Dems (60) as to Reform (five).

He sees Kemi Badenoch's disparaging remarks about Lib Dems being the sort of people who repair the church roof as revealing a lot about her:

It was the kind of comment that makes you question whether Badenoch has any acquaintance with the Conservatives' traditional base. The Blue Wall is a land, as John Major once put it, of "long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers" and, one could add, of village fundraisers to fix the church roof. But Badenoch, too often trapped in an online filter bubble, has little feel for the Burkeans who cherish all of this.

But then, it seems to me, few Tories seem to have that feel today. Their politics are piped in from across the Atlantic and they spend more time online than they do in the community.

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A Very Public Sociologist has no time for Laura Kuenssberg's 'gotcha' style of interviewing: "Every time Laura Kuenssberg interviews anyone newsworthy, her goal is to generate "controversy" rather than shed light on a topic or, heaven forfend, produce a piece of journalism that might help demystify politics."

"The rapid rise of megafarms in Norfolk raises urgent questions about the cost of cheap food. Intensive livestock farming may meet demand, but at what environmental price? From water pollution to biodiversity loss, the evidence is stacking up against these industrial-scale farms." Owen Sennitt looks at the latest campaigning and legal moves.

"Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested early in the morning of Wednesday, 19 March, on two charges - one related to corruption and the other to terrorism. He released a video of himself shortly before the arrest, talking to the camera while nonchalantly adjusting his tie. 'Hundreds of police officers have arrived at my door,' he said. 'I entrust myself to the people.'" Helen Mackreath on Erdoğan's attempt to suppress his most dangerous rival.

Jon Stock, in his book The Sleep Room, tells the story of the psychiatrist William Sargant who, in the 1960s, used a combination of narcosis and ECT to "reprogram" troubled young women. Now his patients, including the actor Celia Imrie and the former model Linda Keith, are trying to piece together what happened. 

Sven Mikulec discusses the long rediscovery of Orson Welles's film Touch of Evil.

"The train begins by cantering over Shropshire farmland, beating out a lively jig. Eventually we reach Knighton — the station is in England, but its car park is in Wales. Beyond the border the landscape changes. Norman churches give way to Methodist chapels; cricket greens to rugby clubs." Oliver Smith takes the Heart of Wales Line from Craven Arms to Llanelli.

The History Man visits Lyddington Bede House in Rutland

Click on the image above to go to a short BBC film about Lyddington Bede House in The Notswolds Rutland.

The Bede House was originally a palace of the Bishops of Lincoln, but after the dissolution of the monasteries it was converted into almshouses.

This is a chance for me to remind you about the BBC Rewind site, which stuffed with good things like this.

Parents held for 11 hours over complaints about daughter’s school

Another story apparently involving overzealous policing, this time from the Guardian:

The parents of a nine-year-old girl have said they were held at a police station for 11 hours because they complained about their daughter’s primary school. 

Maxie Allen and his partner, Rosalind Levine, said they were arrested and detained on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. 

The couple said they had previously been banned from entering Cowley Hill primary school in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire after criticising the school’s headteacher and leadership in a parents’ WhatsApp group, according to the Times.

Richard Bartholomew makes an interesting comment on this story over at The Dark Place - I've embedded his two tweets so you can see the long line of officers arriving.

The "no case to answer" outcome implies police had hoped to identify malicious intent by reviewing private electronic comms or getting the accused to incriminate themselves in interviews - i.e. they were trawling for evidence of a crime, rather than investigating an actual crime.

— Richard Bartholomew (@Barthsnotes) March 30, 2025

Jon Bon Jovi: Staring at Your Window with a Suitcase in My Hand

Fairly or not, I have Jon Bon Jovi down as one of those white American "let's raaq" artists that made us welcome grunge so much. But I've always liked this track because of the guitar sound.

I used to assume it had been sampled from some old bluesman, but I think the truth is that it's just Jon Bon Jovi playing with the help of a little recording wizardry.

Incidentally, Jon Bon Jovi was born John Bongiovi, and adopted his stage name so people would pronounce his real name correctly. Less spectacularly, Spencer Davies became Spencer Davis for the same reason.

Now The Bonkers Arms is in The Notswolds

Remember The Notswolds? There's another article on the concept, this time in the Evening Standard:

The Welland Valley is part of an area often dubbed 'the Notswolds' on account of it being as beautiful as the Cotswolds, but without the price tag. 

Residents of this stretch of south Leicestershire and north Northamptonshire flanking the River Welland will tell you there’s no comparison, though - it’s more picturesque, more accessible and more affordable.

As to exactly where the region is:

Debate rages over exactly where the Welland Valley starts and finishes, but the stretch between Market Harborough and Harringworth represents the "heart" of this beautiful area to Ellie.

Ellie is Ellie Upall from Three Goats, a company that owns three pubs in this part of the world.

One of them is mentioned in the article:

Convinced of its potential as a getaway spot for capital-dwellers, the Three Goats has invested £3m in The Nevill Arms, a boutique country hotel and pub in Medbourne, one of the Valley’s most iconic villages. 

"Medbourne epitomises this region," she says. "It has a brook, lots of stone and thatched houses, a village hall, a shop-cum-post office, a pre-school, a church and a sports club. 

"There’s a strong sense of community and many residents work from home or commute to London. Having Market Harborough and Uppingham nearby is a big bonus, plus you don’t have to travel too far to be in Leicester or Nottingham."

Ellie has noticed an upturn in visitors to The Nevill Arms on "scouting missions" ahead of potentially relocating here. "They’re always surprised how easy it is to get to," she says.

If, as most scholars maintain, Nevil Holt Hall is the model for Bonkers Hall, then Medbourne must be "the village" Lord Bonkers talks about and The Nevill Arms must be The Bonkers Arms.*

Of course, I was on to The Notswolds before it was fashionable. In a Guardian article from 2008, I quoted W.G. Hoskins on eastern Leicestershire: "a landscape of sharp hills, woodland, stone-built villages and many fine churches".

And I quoted Peter Ashley, who is mostly on Instagram these days:

On his blog Unmitigated England, the writer and photographer Peter Ashley describes one of his favourite Midlands locations, the lane that circles Cranoe church in a hairpin bend as it drops into the Welland valley: "I once used to say to companions on this road 'Look at this. You could be in Dorset. Or Devon. You'd never think you were in Leicestershire.'" 

But he has managed to raise his consciousness: "I have now realised what a fatuous remark this is. This is Leicestershire, and in fact very typical of the eastern side of the county."

* To be honest, I envisage the Hall being closer to the village than this. Bonkers Hall has an impressive drive, but I'm sure the pub is no more than a pleasant stroll away if you nip out of a back gate. The fact that there is is a secret passage from the Hall that comes out in the cellar of The Bonkers Arms strengthens the case for their not being far apart. A visit to The Bell Inn at East Langton, handy for J.W. Logan's home at East Langton Grange, will give you an idea of what I have in mind.

The Joy of Six 1340

Andrew Page wonders what the point of the Labour Party is. "I think it's ... fair to say that a lot of us hoped for better from Keir Starmer's Labour Party. Some - myself included - may naturally distrust their authoritarian and centralising instincts, but we expected a government that was more in touch, that was kinder and more socially responsible."

"Words like 'females', 'feminism', 'pregnant person', 'women' and 'underrepresented' - terms that describe the health and life experiences of women - are disappearing from federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control." Try as the Trump administration might, it can’t erase women, promise Kelsey Waits and Michelle Witte.

"This is how they kill free speech. It's not through Twitter suspensions or cancel culture. It's done the old fashioned way, just like they did it a century ago: With thugs in masks bundling someone into the back of a car." Ian Dunt on the left's rediscovery of the importance of free speech.

Guy Shrubsole says the government is right to hold major landowners to account for how they’re treating nature, and supports the newly established National Estate for Nature.

"Just like the cardinals make life-altering decisions for over a billion Catholics behind closed doors, so too do surgeons and doctors make irreversible decisions about intersex kids - without consent, shrouded in secrecy, motivated by fear and instability." Pidgeon Pagonis thinks the makers of Conclave ultimately lacked courage.

Katharine Quarmby is one of 363 authors owed money by Unbound, in her case over £5000: "That money, in the case of authors I have spoken to, was needed to pay rent; some have very young children in their care, others need to pay for care for loved older family members; I had taken time off work to recover from a major operation without worrying too much about money and was relying on Unbound keeping its word. Many of us have been owed money for many months now."

Sharp practice in the orphan trade: The dodgy Dr Barnardo

Mary Hannity, in the new London Review of Books, reviews a work on the social care of children between 1870 and 1920.

In the process she reminds us that Thomas Barnardo ('Dr Barnardo') was not all be purported to be - and not just because he never qualified as a doctor. 

Barnardo opened his first children’s home in Stepney in 1870. Children were not "taken out of the gutter" but most often accompanied to the institution by a parent who used it as a last resort, having "drifted downward" after illness, had an accident, or suffered the death of a breadwinner. They had probably already appealed to extended family and neighbours for support. 

By 1877, hundreds of children were being brought up in homes operated by the association. In the same year, Barnardo was reprimanded at a court arbitration hearing for what were described as "fictitious representations of destitution" (among other things). He had established a photography studio at the Stepney home in 1874 and over the next three decades commissioned around fifty thousand photographs of children admitted to his homes. 

The earliest of these – the photographs discussed at the arbitration hearing – were 'before and after' images that claimed to show the transformation on offer at a Barnardo's home. Filthy boys and girls, looking sullen or sad and dressed in rags, emerged clean, healthy and properly dressed. But the pictures, it turned out, were staged, with both photography sessions taking place on the same day. 

Samuel Reed told the hearing that Barnardo tore his clothes with a penknife for his 'before' photo, and then put him in new clothes and told him to smile for the 'after' photograph.

As Hannity emphasises, care for poor children was often motivated more by a fear of the threat they posed to polite society than by a concern for the children themselves.

Still, the voice of the child does penetrate the review:

One letter ... written by a nine-year-old boy, tells readers that "we have a live rabbit, and we keep a pig and he is growing such a big one, and we went picking up leaves for it, and he romps and rolls in them because he likes them so ... we have got a cat, and she follows us to church, and waits for us till we come out".

Police break into Quaker meeting house to arrest six women at political meeting

I'm blogging about this because the story does not seem to have been covered by any general news outlets.

From Quakers in Britain:

Police broke into a Quaker Meeting House last night (27 March) and arrested six young people holding a meeting over concerns for the climate and Gaza. ...

Just before 7.15pm more than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into Westminster Meeting House.

They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have criminalised many forms of protest and allow police to halt actions deemed too disruptive.

The website quotes Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain:

"No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory.

"This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.

"Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials are an essential part of free public debate which underpins democracy."

Later. The Morning Star has more about Youth Demand, the group whose meeting was raided.

Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe, Melton Mowbray, opens tasting room

The Melton Times calls it 

the final feature in a major refurbishment of the historic Nottingham Street bakery site, which began 15 months ago and has seen the shop being made open plan, heritage displays installed and refurbished sales areas created.

Yes, Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe, Melton Mowbray, is opening a tasting room - or. to be precise, The Tasting Room:

The Tasting Room, which is at the back of the shop in a unit in the adjoining Bell Centre mall, has seated areas where products ranging from Dickinson & Morris pork pies and Mrs King’s Traditional black pudding and Stilton pork pies to their vegetarian cheese and onion quiche can be sampled.

There is also an opportunity for customers to upgrade to a Sharing Platter, with cheeses, Scotch egg, locally-baked bread and deli meats, all accompanied by a fresh salad and chutney.

Think of it as Leicestershire soul food.

A 1922 campaign to reopen Medbourne railway station

From the Grantham Journal, Saturday 16 December 1922.

Medbourne

Re-Opening Railway Station Wanted. - At a meeting of the Parish Council, steps were decided upon with a view to inducing the G.N.R. Company to re-open Medbourne Station, which was closed during the war,, and the train service from Leicester to Peterborough, via Seaton Junction, suspended.

Medbourne station was open for only 33 years. It and the short line through it opened in 1883, the line was singled in 1905 and the station was closed as a wartime economy measure in 1916.

After that the line was used chiefly for storing wagons, but wasn't lifted until the 1960s.

One problem with the station was that the GNR's Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough service, which called there, took a circuitous route - though probably no more so than the Leicester to Peterborough service that runs today via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford.

The Medbourne Village site suggests that people there would rather have had a train to Market Harborough.

One irony is that the village sat inside a triangle of lines, so whichever way you left Medbourne, you crossed a railway. No wonder there was a campaign in 1922 to get their station back.

Rumer Godden writes about a multiracial London street in 1956

I'm reading An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden - it's for a thing - and have come across another early celebration of multiracial London. The previous one, by Marjorie Allingham, dated from 1965: this one from Rumer Godden dates from 1956:

The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English, but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else, all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere. 

It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses, No 11 for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house, Catford Street. with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row - which had no gardens - running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.

The observer is Olivia, the most sympathetic of the novel's adult characters, but even her worldly younger sister Angela is worried by the social class of the Catford Street children who sometimes spill into the more genteel Mortimer Square, not their race.

And note that Godden doesn't see the assimilation of people from other cultures into English society as a problem. Instead, she wonders at how quickly it takes place.

An Episode of Sparrows is the book on which perhaps the most interesting of my children-and-bombsites films, Innocent Sinners, is based.

Reader's voice: Have you left in that last bit of the quotation because it contains a whopping great Christian symbol?

An impressed Liberal England replies: Not much gets past you, does it?

Rare fossil named 'Sue' after palaeontologist's mum

 

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale of life at the University of Leicester.

Good evening from the Notswolds

For the third year in a row, Market Harborough has been named by the Sunday Times as one of the best places to live in Britain.

The Times report on this achievement, mercifully locked behind its paywall begins:

Some call this area the Notswolds - i.e. the Cotswolds without the pretentiousness or the price tag.

"What are they on about?" I wondered when I saw this. "No one calls it that."

Oh but they do. Try a search for 'Notswolds' on Google News and the term is everywhere.

It is used to mean Rutland in particular, or Rutland, Leicestershire. Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire more generally.

I've always said there are villages round here that would be tourist honeypots if they were in the Cotswolds. Perhaps they will be now?

Just think of a better name someone.

Looking after the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

This is the trailer for the film documentary Our Dinosaurs.

The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs site will tell you all about them:

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was the sculptor responsible for the statues that today are remembered as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. He was a natural history artist of international reputation. His sculptures were set in a landscape designed by Joseph Paxton that also included hillside illustrations of economic geology created by Professor David Ansted. 

This section of the park was constructed 1853-1855 to accompany the relocation of the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham Hill in south London following the Great Exhibition of 1851, and has remained largely as it appeared to visitors when the park opened. The statues are the first ever attempt to interpret paleontological discoveries as full-scale, full-bodied, living animals.

Liberal Democrats takes the lead in Southern England

A striking graphic from Liberal Democrat High Command.

The figures to back it up can be found in the detailed YouGov Survey Results for the voting intention survey conducted on 23 and 24 March.

If you look at the top right of page 1, you will see that England is divided into only four regions: North, Midlands, London and South.

This means that the Lib Dems are running first across a huge swathe of Southern England.

Recent developments in the US have been bad for both the Reform and the Conservatives, which suggests that their dogfight over which of them is more right wing is going to drag them both down.

Munira Wilson routs David Frost on the effects of Brexit

An overused term on social media, but @munirawilson SCHOOLS Lord Frost on #Brexit here - and it is glorious!

DF: "Anyone can come up with anecdotes."

MW: "These are not anecdotes, but cold hard facts. Your Brexit is damaging our economy that your gov't left on its knees." ~AA pic.twitter.com/VDT0rwd1nN

— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) March 24, 2025

Three years ago an "ally" told The Sunday Telegraph earlier that David Frost was a "proper Conservative" with "star quality", who could even be a future prime minister. 

There was little sign of star quality when Frost debated the effects of Brexit with Liberal Democrat front-bencher Munira Wilson on the BBC's Politics Live yesterday. By common consent, she sent Frost back to school on the subject.

You can see a little of their exchanges in the video above, and you can read an enthusiastic, blow-by-blow account from Huffington Post too:

Asked if she agreed with Frost, Wilson said: “Absolutely not. We know that Brexit has massively hurt our economy, and actually everybody wants growth.

“The best way we can kickstart growth is by negotiating a far better deal with our European friends and neighbours at a time of great economic insecurity.”

She said this would help “cut the red tape that David is so desperate to cut” – and pointed to businesses in her own constituency who are spending huge sums to overcome Brexit bureaucracy.

Frost replied: “Anybody can come up with anecdotes about extra paperwork. The important thing is to look at the macro-picture, what’s happening to the economy.”

“It is not just anecdotes!” Wilson cut in. “We know that our exports to the EU are down £27bn, we know that four out of 10 British goods that were on European shelves before Brexit are not there anymore.

“How is that anecdote? That is cold hard fact that your hard Brexit is damaging our economy.”

Let me finish by offering a useful glossary to help you to decode terms you may come across in the political press.

Glossary

'Ally of Lord Frost' - Lord Frost.

Steve Winwood: Dear Mr Fantasy

Before he ever saw a Hammond organ, Steve Winwood was a brilliant guitarist and jazz pianist. 

Here he is at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2007.