An incredibly moving #Roman tombstone, dedicated to a little girl named Geminia Agathe. You can almost feel the emotion over her death pouring into the inscription, which is addresses directly to the reader, even at a remove of nearly 2000 years...

Four Tops - Bernadette (Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1967) One of my big favourites by the Four Tops & this is definitely my fav live performance of the song. Levi Stubbs rocketing, distinguished voice is one of the all-time best in pop & soul music history. Magical! #Legends

I'd put the timing differently. I don't think it was really the Equality Act itself. By the time that was passed, a much broader progressive worldview had already taken root across universities, the civil service, HR departments, broadcasters and parts of policing. It amounted to the "long march through the institutions" that people on the Right had warned about for decades and were largely dismissed for saying. That worldview didn't ask people simply to rub along and judge each other as individuals. It encouraged people to see society through group identity: race, sex, sexual orientation and gender, with groups often discussed in terms of privilege, disadvantage and victimhood. Institutions then built policies, training programmes and whole departments around those ideas. Differences that had once sat quietly in the background of ordinary life were pushed to the foreground. That's where identity politics and what became known as "wokeism" did real damage. Britain had hardly been free of prejudice before. It hadn't. But the old liberal ideal was that race should matter less, not more. The aim was to reach the point where a person's colour was about as interesting as the colour of his eyes. Instead, we went backwards. "Colour-blindness" itself became suspect. People were divided into ever more categories and then encouraged to understand themselves and others through those categories. So I don't think Britain simply became less tolerant. I think tolerance stopped being enough. We went from "live and let live" and equal treatment before the law to an increasingly prescriptive politics of identity, grievance and victimhood. And then we wondered why everyone started noticing the differences again.

Earlier today, a chartered night train carrying Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Merz's top security adviser, and security advisers from the UK, France, and Italy was stopped near the Polish border after a Russian drone struck the locomotive of a passenger train traveling the same route. The group was returning from the YES security conference in Kyiv. Their train was partially evacuated at 5am before an all-clear was given. On the Polish side, jets scrambled and sirens sounded.