Brendan O'Neill explains why here.

Today marks the bicentenary of the birth of William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister of a Liberal administration.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft makes the case for the Grand Old Man.

You can read more about Gladstone here and his family here.

Pretty grim, at least in Britain, according to Bryan Ward-Perkins, historian of (particularly) Late Antiquity at Trinity College, Oxford.

Here's his recent essay on Britain after the Romans left."It took centuries to reconstruct networks of specialisation and exchange comparable to those of the Roman period."

Here's his immensely interesting and entertaining interview about the fall of the Roman empire. And here's a review of his book, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2005; paperback, 2006).

Michele Ledda explains why an examination board's ban on Carol Ann Duffy’s"Education for Leisure" is a stab in the back for liberal education.

Dolan Cummings discusses Ayn Rand at the self-identified libertarian Marxist website spiked-online.

That's the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

Read here and here how the British government has caved into the demands of the Obama administration.

Why Thatcher Defended the Berlin Wall.

Save yourself some time. Read this summary.

Go here and here to read two extracts from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book SuperFreakonomics. And don't miss the story about the monkeys in the first extract. Tim Harford, who as the"Undercover Economist" writes a weekly column for the Financial Times, believes this is a better book than their bestseller Freakonomics (2005). I wasn't the only person to think that book seriously trivialized economics.