Prior to about 40,000 years ago, hominins had been observing other hominins die for more than six million years. They were intimately acquainted with death as something that happened to others. They observed people die within their living group - children from disease, women from childbirth, men from hunting accidents, and older adults from starvation. They also occasionally encountered deceased hominins as they foraged for food or followed herds of deer. Unlike today, when the biological realities of death are relegated to the offices of medical examiners and morticians, early hominins saw corpses in all stages of decomposition, since even the occasional burial of bodies was apparently not practiced until the last 100,000 years.

Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There's the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There's the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.

I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners and that's really hard work.

My physics teacher Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.

For an actress to be a success she must have the face of a Venus the brains of a Minerva the grace of Terpsichore the memory of a MaCaulay the figure of Juno and the hide of a rhinoceros.

For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus the brains of a Minerva the grace of Terpsichore the memory of a Macaulay the figure of Juno and the hide of a rhinoceros.

All too often miners and indeed other trade unionists underestimate the economic strength they have.

There's a new science out called orthomolecular medicine. You correct the chemical imbalance with amino acids and vitamins and minerals that are naturally in the body.

Goethe died in 1832. As you know Goethe was very active in science. In fact he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore they felt he couldn't be serious.

When resources are degraded we start competing for them whether it is at the local level in Kenya where we had tribal clashes over land and water or at the global level where we are fighting over water oil and minerals. So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line hungry. And so they started to see a lot of that and there was that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners you know it was like a power struggle.

Most people who are selling their mineral rights this is a once-in-a-lifetime transaction. The people who are buying the landmen who are coming in do it every day. So there's a little inequity there about knowledge.

God sleeps in the minerals awakens in plants walks in animals and thinks in man.

The meek shall inherit the Earth but not its mineral rights.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

It proved easier to buy the farm to get the mineral rights than to buy the coal rights alone.