Claude has either just led me up the garden path half a dozen times or has enabled me to fix a complicated internet connection problem on this laptop – DNS this and DNS that – that I couldn’t have managed to do myself: which was it?
1. There’s some good local stories on The Manchester Mill. Not everything is outside their paywall, but this two-parter by Toby Harnden & Jack Dulhanty is, and – as they might say in Northern Ireland – it’s a cracker, The IRA men behind the Manchester bomb: unravelling a 30-year mystery
2. The Conversation is running a series of articles on Britain’s quarter century, i.e. the first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century.
Summer 2001. Tony Blair had just won a second thumping election victory, promising opportunity for all. The new census showed a nation losing its religion, more inclined to live alone and more ethnically diverse. The maximum temperature was a tepid 32°C in west London in late June, while the twin towers rose tall and proud as always over the New York skyline. Twenty-five years on, we wanted to look at how the UK has changed. Welcome to the first of a six-part report from a group of 35 specialists, exploring all of the key developments in the intervening period.
Here’s the first two:
Britain’s quarter century: Blair, populism and the battle over human rights
Britain’s quarter century: wealth and widening inequality
https://theconversation.com/britains-quarter-century-wealth-and-widening-inequality-287410
3. As follow up to the Alan Milburn report on NEETs that I posted on Thursday, here’s two more reports on the topic that Claude suggested were also worth a look:
Lost in transition: an examination of why the UK NEET rate is high and rising by Alex Clegg, Nye Cominetti, Julia Diniz, Lindsay Judge & Imogen Stone from The Resolution Foundation
Why has the NEET rate risen? Understanding trends and drivers using administrative data from The Institute for Fiscal Studies
PDFs of the executive summaries (only) of both reports below.
4. The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize for novels written in English, this year by writers from Mexico, Turkey, England, Ireland, Scotland, Jamaica and the USA, was announced recently: here’s a feature on all the longlisted writers with links to interviews and extracts from the novels https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/get-to-know-the-authors-longlisted-for-the-booker-prize-2026
5. And, finally, a little Latin from Word Smarts, Carpe Diem With These Everyday Latin Phrases https://wordsmarts.com/latin-phrases/ What are you waiting for?
Roy Cross's Blog 