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Vinous Ali has visited the refugee camps of Northern Greece with Tim Farron.

The House of Lords by-election to replace Eric Avebury is ludicrous and should be boycotted, say John Lubbock and Seth Thévoz.

"There will be no incumbents, and few of the ex-MEPs are expected to run ... So, there is every possibility that new names may emerge and end up as Liberal Democrat MEPs." Mark Valladares says the forthcoming selections for Liberal Democrat Euro candidates will be the most open yet.

Kyra Hanson on guerrilla gardening and the battle against concrete paving and private development in London.

"Verification and fact-checking are regularly falling prey to the pressure to bring in the numbers, and if the only result of being caught out is another chance to bring in the clicks, that looks unlikely to change." Kevin Rawlinson on the new plague of fake news stories.

Flickering Lamps visits Brompton Cemetery and returns with tales of soldiers and adventurers - and rumours of a time machine.

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Lord Bonkers on the by-election for a Lib Dem hereditary peer

The sad death of Eric Avebury means there has to be a by-election to choose a new Liberal Democrat hereditary peer.

A BBC News report suggests there will be two candidates: John Russell (the current Earl Russell and the son of the much-missed Conrad Russell) and John Thurso (former member of the Lords and former MP for Caithness and Sutherland).

But then the electorate is barely larger than the number of candidates:

Three current Lib Dem hereditaries are entitled to vote: Lord Addington, the descendent of a Conservative MP from the 1880s; the Earl of Glasgow, the descendent of one of the Scottish Commissioners who negotiated the 1703 Union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England; and the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who is directly descended from the Liberal Prime Minister H H Asquith.

Or should that be four current Lib Dem hereditaries?

Lord Bonkers holds a Rutland peerage, which means he is sometimes overlooked by the pundits, but he is determined to vote in this election.

I don't know which way he will vote, but he did remark at dinner the other night that "the Russells always come good in the end" and that "this Thurso fella needs to make up his mind which House he wants to sit in".

He also said that a donation to the Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans before the votes are cast on 19 April would be "a Terribly Nice Gesture".

Thanks to Mark Pack.

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"Eric's family hope you can join them for an afternoon to celebrate his life and work at The Royal Institution, 2.00pm on Thursday 30th June 2016. There will be a number of guest speakers, audio visual clips and music, followed by light refreshments." Details of the memorial service for Eric Avebury,

"I wish I'd never decided to work in an immigration detention centre," says an anonymous article on politics.co.uk.

Stephen Williams presents an electoral history of Bristol Liberal Democrats 1973-2016.

"Newsagents reached parts of the population that most booksellers and stationers hadn’t previously: the working class. Newsagents could provide a one-stop shop for working-class autodidacts in the interwar period." Misplacedhabits on the need for a history of newsagents' shops.

"Get Carter was different from all other films in that it somehow ‘belonged’ to the north-east – projecting and validating a tough-but-tender image of the region that chimed with the area’s self-romanticising view of itself." Neil Young on a great film, 45 years on.

Railway Maniac on a little piece of Lincolnshire railway history: the Allington Chord.

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Charles Sydney Buxton and Eric Avebury were cousins

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When I blogged about the Liberal flyer from the first 1910 general election I bought on Sunday, I said Charles Sydney Buxton and Eric Avebury were kinsmen.

A little research shows that they were cousins - or half-cousins, if there is such a relationship - as they had the same grandfather.

That grandfather was John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, who had 11 children from two marriages.

Charles was the son of his eldest child Constance Mary Lubbock. She was the daughter of John Lubbock's first wife Ellen Frances Hordern.

Eric Avebury was the son of his youngest child, Maurice Fox Pitt Lubbock. He was the son of John Lubbock's second wife Alice Fox-Pitt.

When I set off for the antique fair on Sunday I had just heard of Eric Avebury's death - just one of those odd coincidences.

It is striking to come across cousins who died more than a century apart and also strking that Eric Avebury eventuallly inherited his grandfather's title despite being born to the youngest of his 11 children.

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Six of the Best 574

Eric Avebury, the Liberal Democrat peer and Liberal victor in the famous Orpington by-election, has died. Lib Dem Voice has an interview about his life that he gave to his son John and Seth Thevoz last year.

Emran Mian says we should not harangue Google for paying so little tax in Britain but globalise taxation.

"At Petworth we can walk through the realised dreams of the landlords: a glorious country estate that projects the power, prestige, even the seeming naturalness, of the aristocracy. The history of our more humble ancestors ... are smoothed over, buried, obscured." Mark Hailwood goes for a walk in the country.

Nicholas Whyte has been to the Royal College of Physicians' exhibition on John Dee - "scholar, courtier, magician".

"John Perry was heard crying out for assistance in the garden. When help arrived, he was found alone but in a state of some agitation. He claimed that, while working in the garden, he had been unaccountably set upon by two men dressed in white, who had assaulted him with their swords." Alwyn Turner examines what sounds very like a 17th-century UFO abduction.

Historic England presents nine breweries of architectural distinction.

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