In 1923, a young miner named William Davison was killed crossing Dawdon Colliery pit yard when falling timber fractured his skull. Because his widow had never been to Newcastle before, a union official met her at the bus stop to take her to the solicitors.

The stately delphinium, that most elegant of garden flowers, typically standing resplendent en pointe in clusters at the rear of the border, arrayed in a petalled garb of deep blue or rich purple, has rather fallen from favour in recent years.

The pages of this newspaper are full of articles and stories about protests; be they progressive, reactionary or anything in between. But what of the places, usually outdoors spaces, where protests take place? Sometimes these places are the subject of protest themselves.

Having been named for her father, Louis, a mere dealer in antique tapestries, seemed insufficiently romantic to Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in 1911.

Proxies​ stand in for something or someone else: a press secretary stands in for a politician; the number of citations a scientific paper gets stands in for its significance; the rise or fall of Gross Domestic Product stands in for the overall health of the economy.

Harvey C. Mans​field, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy.

A decision by NHS England to withdraw open-source code created with UK taxpayer funds because of the risk posed by computer-hacking AI models is attracting growing backlash.

At the centre of Henry Snow’s book stands Jeremy Bentham’s proposed prison-rotunda, the Panopticon.
Snow reminds us that the idea of a building designed round a central inspection tower “was a workplace before it was a prison”, the brainchild of the philosopher’s mechanically minded younger brother, Samuel.

As Wordsworth found in Paris after 1789, revolutions are deeply enthralling. There is nothing so bold, so self-sacrificing, so brave, so cruel as a revolutionary crowd. What’s more, revolutions have shaped the modern world.

If you thought merchandise inspired by Frida Kahlo had reached its peak in 2018 with a controversial “Frida” Barbie doll, complete with floral headpiece and braided hair, think again.