For two hundred years, Britain needed coal. The men who braved dreadful danger to hew it out of rocks miles underground were considered heroes; their trade union was feared by governments and revered by the rest of the labour movement. In 1984, with brutal suddenness, all this stopped. We found we could do without miners, and so we got rid of them, just like that. Today, forty years on, what miners did, what it cost them to do it and why they thought their way of life was worth fighting for are remembered only by a fast-dwindling group of mining families ... read more

The box lay on the table. ‘Everything is in here,’ the man in white said in a thick German accent. ‘I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people,’ he continued, ‘now it’s your turn.’ His interlocutor, also clad in white, listened intently. This isn’t the opening scene of a gangster film. It’s what happened when Pope Francis met with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, as related by Francis himself ... read more

Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a history of pink, which may not be ‘a color in its own right’ and for which neither Latin nor ancient Greek has a standard word (it was long regarded as a shade of red). Nevertheless, Pink is as sumptuous as its predecessors, printed on gorgeous glossy paper and written with impassioned scholarship. When Isaac Newton ... read more

Early in 1634, two young Middle Temple lawyers helped organise one of the costliest entertainments ever staged before the Whitehall court, a masque celebrating the reign of Charles I entitled The Triumph of Peace. The triumph it saluted proved to be short-lived. Within less than a decade, Charles’s ‘reign of peace’ had imploded and the two amateur impresarios found themselves on opposing sides in the ensuing civil war – Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605–75) as a lukewarm Parliamentarian, Edward Hyde (1609–74) as a reluctant Cavalier ... read more

Founded in 1987, Huawei is one of China’s largest private conglomerates, employing over 200,000 people in 170 countries. It is not the biggest Chinese enterprise – the electric car maker Buy Your Dream has more than 900,000 workers, including 110,000 engineers in research and development. Huawei began as a modest telecoms venture, producing analogue and digital exchange switches for landline systems in a country with a poor phone network. These boxes replaced ranks of usually female switchboard operators of the kind ... read more

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four ... read more