Writing or teaching about the subject of this book, the history of race, is no longer simply about the past; it is decidedly about our present. Yet it remains imperative to go back to the 18th century and even earlier to understand where the most dangerous idea ever invented came from.

Here we go again. Back to “Yesterday”. Back to “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Except: today looks very much like yesterday and those times ain’t a-changed one bit. The pop charts are still dominated by semi-literate two-chord jingles.

At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest cheque as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v Anthropic.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB.

In the satirical print ‘Remarkable Characters at Mrs Cornely’s Masquerade’ from February 1771, the Georgian craze for dressing up as fantastical characters is shown in all its theatricality and wild invention.

Many books describe how the first atomic bomb was built. But this history by Emily Seyl stands apart. It tells the story of the bomb’s Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945 through restored photographs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Research Center, where Seyl works.

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.