Society

But it’s a boy thing, admits Mark Mason. Women are just too sensible to watch Spinal Tap 35 times — but they don’t know what connects Ringo Starr and Shane Warne For years I thought it was just me and my friends. Merrily we dotted our conversations with random facts — Carlsberg Special Brew was invented for Winston Churchill, the M2 is the only British motorway that connects with no other motorway, a Rubik’s Cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a century… Never did we stop to think that this trait might actually say anything about us. But then along came Schott’s Miscellany, Does Anything Eat Wasps?

Gordon Brown’s first anniversary in Number 10 Downing Street is passing in the usual whirl of Prime Ministerial hyperactivity. It would have been out of character for Mr Brown to raise a glass if the year had been an unambiguous triumph, but even a more fun-loving leader would balk at toasting the last 12 months. Instead the event is marked by an eruption of articles and television programmes seeking to analyse what has gone wrong. Mr Brown will not have liked any of them. A less commonly asked question in the media’s volcanic eruption is what, if anything, the Prime Minister can do to change the situation in his second

Venetia Thompson says that the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment does work that nobody else can and constructs homes that buck current property market trends Robin Hood famously robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but I am certain that he never suggested that the poor should then be crammed into tower blocks like battery chickens in the name of Modernist architecture until they were finally stabbed to death in a deserted stairwell. There is nothing truly egalitarian about the ironically named Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London — except the equality of squalor. It is no surprise that most of its 400 residents want the