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23 June 2021updated 30 Aug 2021 3:16pm

This England: Balancing the books

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II, refers to the whole of Britain – has run in the NS since 1934.

By New Statesman

Sales at a children’s bookshop surged after actor Laurence Fox took aim at it. Fox tweeted: “Please f**** off you moronic, narcissistic middle-class white birds”, after Little Box of Books wrote its fare had “a diverse cast of characters”.  But owner Lynsey Pollard swiftly put a LFOX10 discount code on her site, and the shop’s sales rose by 20 per cent. Pollard said that she thought selling more books “would annoy him the most”.
Metro (Daragh Brady)

Raising the dead

A family got a “huge shock” when their pet cat that they thought they had cremated turned up alive and well. Frankie, a 16-year-old tabby, went missing from his home in Warrington in May. Days later, Frankie’s owner Rachel Fitzsimons saw a similar looking dead cat on the M6 motorway and Highways England staff gave it to the family to be cremated. Fitzsimons’s son declared Frankie’s reappearance as a “miracle”. Fitzsimons added: “He came back, frail and hungry but alive. So we cremated someone else’s cat.”
BBC North West (Christopher Rossi)

Beach you to it

The bikini worn by Barbara Windsor in Carry On Camping has sold for £9,500 at auction in London. The swimsuit, worn by the late actress in the 1969 film, which showed her bikini top flying off in the middle of an exercise class, was expected to fetch between £800 and £1,200. Auctioneer Kerry Taylor said: “We have had so much interest in this bikini.”
Yorkshire Post (Michael Meadowcroft)

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This article appears in the 23 Jun 2021 issue of the New Statesman, How Brexit changed us