Failure to launch

This week: some English counties that never happened, some maps of where the animals live, and if we’re honest with ourselves the British media isn’t great, really, is it?

An uncomfortably large number of years ago now, in one of my earliest pieces for the New Statesman, I argued that, if JK Rowling really wanted to fight the social injustice being pursued by the then coalition government, she should buy her own newspaper. I wouldn’t write that now for reasons you can definitely guess at, and, now I come to think of it, i…