1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")
2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.
3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.
4. A literary map of the UK.
5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)
6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.
7. Here is something written by a transwoman who became a Catholic after transitioning: Durham University's Centre for Catholic Studies' "nurturing, dialogical community showed [her] the possibility for reconciliation with the ecclesial tradition that had nourished [her] theological imagination".
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