Liberal England

I saw a tweet by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, in support of the End Sexism in Schools campaign. It said that, "shockingly", only two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors.
It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature....

William Davies reviewed The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet by Brett Christophers in a recent issue of the London Review of Books.
The opening of his review is worth reading in its own right:
The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’....

Maddy Costa wrote about the Raincoats in the Guardian back in 2009:
When Gina Birch and Ana da Silva decided to start a band in the late 1970s, they were art students who "knew nothing" about music. "Ana knew a couple of chords," says Birch, "and I could sing along with a few hymns and rock'n'roll tunes."...

"The Gay Dolphin is almost as old as Rye itself. I am not sure how old it is, but there is no doubt that it was much used by smugglers and I am now fairly confident that it contains some secret which I have never discovered."
It's little wonder that readers of Malcolm Saville's The Gay Dolphin Adventure* think the Mermaid in Rye was the model for the Gay Dolphin....