You know what weird millionaire vampire man, I appreciate that your special interest in your girlfriend’s pussy is probably going to lead to some of the only funded research of the female reproductive system in decades if not centuries.

I think this is sad and I suspect she is still being controlled by her father with whom we had some interesting dealings when she was walking across America to the Climate Summit in Chilè in 2019. He asked us if Maiden would wait for her in LA and take her as she would not fly. As we were heading that way on our tour and would only have to delay our schedule for a couple of weeks we glady agreed. I thought she was inspirational. Then the unrest happened and the summit was moved to Madrid, Spain. Her father said he had found a yacht on the East Coast (USA) but needed a Skipper - could I reommend someone? So I did and she then took them across the Atlantic. I didn't realise and she told me later......... she was in the UK at the time and so they 'flew her from UK to the USA' so that Greta could 'sail' to the summit'. Doh! That is when reality kicked in. I do worry about her though.

Grace Cossington Smith's 'The Sock Knitter (1915) depicting her sister Madge knitting socks for troops in WW1,is distinctly modern in its outlook and counterpoints common narratives of heroism in wartime by focusing instead on the quiet steady efforts of women on the home front.

We have some news. This autumn we are opening a second Persephone bookshop – in London, in Fitzrovia to be precise. We had not actually been planning this, but by chance we heard about a 1767 four-storey house that had become available... More info here: persephonebooks.co.uk/blogs/…

'The Brothers.' (1928) A child prodigy, Joan Manning-Sanders was aged 15 when this work was painted and was the youngest artist to have shown at the RA Summer Exhibition in the late 1920s.

My letter in this week’s @Spectator, especially for fanboys of my late brother.

This article reflects something I’ve been talking about for a while. When a diagnosis is used as a way to decide who gets access to resources or not, then this is going to result in inequality. That’s because those who can afford to pay for a diagnosis and those who understand the system will get their diagnoses more quickly. This will then enable them to access public services more quickly. Those who cannot afford to pay or who do not understand the system will be left behind on a long waiting list, or maybe won’t even get that far. There is no blame attached to this observation. It’s not an attack. Of course parents will do whatever they can to help their children, and if they have the resources to pay privately many of them will do that. But if we have a system where public services are dependent on a diagnosis, and that diagnosis can be obtained more quickly if you pay, then we are going to end up with the most affluent people receiving most services. This is a side effect of the burgeoning market in private diagnostic assessments which has sprung up over the last fifteen years. As a society, we need to look clearly at what is happening and decide whether this is the best way to allocate public resources. theguardian.com/society/2026…

Yesterday morning I took my mum to the GP feeling unwell and they found a satsuma-sized lump. She was given a referral for suspected gynaecological cancer and sent for an urgent blood test. What happened next shocked me. This is what NHS privatisation means in practice👇1/🧵

With the heroes of the @RNLI under attack again, I’m reminded of this passage from Bill Bryson.

Glad to see this story being given the coverage it deserves. Not least because @pcaruanagalizia, Daphne’s son, was Tortoise’s star reporter for many years. But more importantly because it’s a morality tale of where political corruption leads: to murder & impunity in the very heart of Europe.

Doctors X-rayed pregnant women routinely in the 1950s to check which way round the baby was lying. Nobody thought it was dangerous. Alice Stewart noticed childhood leukaemia rising sharply in Britain and set out to find why. She and her team interviewed the mothers of 1,400 children who had died of cancer, and 1,400 mothers whose children were alive, and asked them the same questions. The pattern showed up in the first 35 pairs. Children who had died were about twice as likely to have been X-rayed in the womb, and a single scan at the dose used then appeared to be enough. She published in 1956, and the response was outrage. Radiation was the technology of the future in the 1950s, and the claim that a low dose could cause cancer years later contradicted what the entire medical and nuclear establishment believed. Her methods were attacked. Her funding suffered. Doctors carried on X-raying pregnant women. It took roughly 25 years for the medical world to come round. Pregnant women were still routinely X-rayed into the late 1970s. Two decades after she told them to stop. She retired in 1974 and did her most contested work afterwards, in her seventies, examining the health records of American nuclear weapons workers. Her findings there were unwelcome enough that the Department of Energy cut off her access to the data. She spent 14 years fighting them and testified before Congress, and in 1990 the records were opened to independent researchers. She died in 2002, aged 95. The children who were never X-rayed have no idea who she was. history.rcp.ac.uk/blog/alice…

Why can’t we instead be honest about what ADHD is—and what it is not—as psychiatrist @awaisaftab is here, in an @nytimes article from earlier this year? Why the insistence on presenting it as an established neurological issue and confusing people? nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opini…

'When I married my husband three decades ago, the guest list was sprinkled with exes. Apparently, this makes us outliers in modern Britain' ‘Young people have been brainwashed into following a zero-contact policy after a breakup, which is reframed as setting healthy boundaries' But @RowanPelling argues that 'keeping exes in the fold is the ultimate sign of maturity.' Here's why ⬇️ telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08…