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The proposed pipeline, or “Black Snake” as the Sioux call it, creeps ever closer.

"Months of dispute, a lying agent, and landlords who treated us like scum."

Labour leadership contenders clash on the EU and the past at PLP hustings.

“It's virtually inconceivable that Labour can win the next election by just doing well in England and Wales – it’s just brutal arithmetic.”

The only pollster to call the election right says Labour will struggle to win the next election without Scotland.

Party outsider Christian Wolmar has made Labour's London mayoral selection ballot paper. But who is he, and why does he think the other candidates are simply in it for a "career move"?

Suggesting that Britain is as corrupt as klepto-states such as Afghanistan or Russia, and that only residual racism prevents us from perceiving this, means you really need to get out more.

Some Tories believe a character known outside of politics could be their only way of beating Labour to controlling a generally Labour-leaning city.

New Labour was a onetime political move based on 18 years of Tory misrule and 60 consecutive quarters of growth that allowed the party to paper over lots of cracks and, for a short while, keep everyone in a big tent.

Anyone frustrated with how the Tories got away with playing fast and loose with fiscal responsibility in the last weeks of the election might look to our neurological wiring to explain why this largely escaped scrutiny.

Sympathy for the devil?

"If you thought it was all rubbish, why did you stay in the shadow cabinet? Why didn't you come out and say that you thought it was terrible?"

Diane Abbott hits out at Labour's leadership candidates:

If you’re as much of a Sword Art Online/Back to the Future fan as I am, you’ll be looking forward to this.

Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control.

Neil Gaiman's Credo:

"They see this big unknown mountain, and think it carries lots of bad people. But that’s not right."

Where next? Theoretically, which other routes could be added to TfL's rail portfolio?

“Now, young man, where do you represent?” The flustered self-chosen one spluttered, “Uxbridge,” before Alec Shelbrooke and a group of wind-up merchants standing out of the Speaker’s eyeline burst into giggles, to Johnson’s evident embarrassment.

Looking up, I found I was surrounded by those Greek women who dress all in black the minute they get the chance. They were crossing themselves. I wondered if I was actually dead.

These back-room frumps whisper instructions into the earpieces of tuxedo-wearing spies out on the casino floors, or save them from pursuers by launching strategic missile attacks at a moment’s notice.

Handel invested not just once in the slave trade, but repeatedly.

“She was always bold, jumping into ponds not knowing what was underneath, or running through cemeteries at night.”

One Haitian man remembers roads lined with bodies – “pow, pow, pow, like that”, he says, chopping out lines with his hand.

The ratio of deficit to GDP has fallen in the US thanks to economic growth, which – rather than austerity – is of course the well-tried way of achieving the desired result.

Paying a visit to the one-man hit machine.

Rowan Williams: "What is interesting in the history of religions is that blasphemy isn’t always about attacking or rejecting faith itself."

Eventually, sated with stories and flavours, I concluded that heaven was in fact right here at this table.

My life as an eight-foot bird.

One academic proudly related to me Wilde’s wonder at the city fathers who had seen fit to name Lincoln’s main thoroughfare “0 Street” – as in zero.

Would I be labelled a “worried” mother, or worse, a “non-compliant” one?

A single statute would solve 90 per cent of the problem overnight.

Though meeting John was the beginning of an authentic claim on happiness, our early years together found me still only an intermittent champion of gay pride. Then we had children. Children confiscate your mask, leaving you far more exposed than lovers can.

Get ready for a lot of Einstein love. This year marks the centenary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity works. Sort of.

She made a painful and, to me, stunning choice. She decided to deny the militants this leverage. “I didn’t want to be the reason my sons had to fight,” she says, “so I left everything I had.”

John Simpson: Even the Iraqi army’s catastrophic mistake in Ramadi didn’t mean that IS, also known as Isis, was winning the war.

What a bunch of pricks my fans are.

Will Self: "I shudder to think how freaked out Thomas Hardy would be by these crowds of Bathsheba Everdenes and Gabriel Oaks gaily traipsing across towns on the sides of buses."

Holier than thou

The main attraction of street names is the way in which they sum up the city they inhabit, offering a flavour of the local character to residents and visitors alike.

Magna Carta is a striking example of useful myths. Opponents of British ruling elites – such as the 17th-century revolutionaries who fought Charles I – appropriated Magna Carta to give legitimacy to their cause.

For Westminster to take back powers, particularly permanently, will infantilise the Stormont government and put an end to further reconciliation.

An eating disorder might be a complex mental disorder, but it’s nothing that Pinterest can’t control...

It is the single biggest thing that Londoners need from their next Mayor: a solution to the housing crisis.

Immigration is the backbone of the UK. Don't break it.

We talk about the Labour leadership race and Ali Smith's How to Be Both. Plus, a poem from a reader. (With Caroline Crampton, George Eaton, Anoosh Chakelian, Tom Gatti, Stephanie Boland.)

"Charles' death was caused by a major haemorrhage and the report makes clear this was a consequence of his battle with alcoholism."

Swearing about how great Ed Miliband is on live lunchtime telly.

The hope that history will repeat itself has been much picked over in pro-European gatherings - even when they are meant to be strategising about the next referendum, not the last one.

Stella Creasy: "Einstein’s definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result."

"Your Royal Highness's most humble and obedient servant", said Andy Burnham to Prince Charles.

Who's nominating who so far in the Labour leadership contest?

Let’s not be prudish – it seems HoloLen’s most profitable application is in pornography.

Miliband's inequality speech shows he will be a participant in Labour's future.

“Tessa Jowell's the Blair continuity candidate” - the independent-minded Labour MP Diane Abbott hits out at her London mayoral rivals, and the Labour leadership candidates for being too white and on the right.

Hackney is planning to tackle rough sleepers by, er, fining them

This map shows at a glance where Europe's richest cities and regions are

"A riot is the language of the unheard": Baltimore and America's long legacy of hollowed-out cities

Even if – as many predict – we vote to stay in ‘the club’ in 2016-17, the echoes of this referendum will continue for years afterwards.

Hooray for a leftwing alternative! At last, a genuine voice of the people!

Well, apart from on basic equality.

The next Labour leader will find it even harder to convince anyone that they can become prime minister. Here's why:

The winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction has been announced - but why do we still need women-only book awards?

Our dominatrix blogger interviews the new SNP MP, Anne McLaughlin: