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.

Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. He will have destroyed the N.U.M. as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader.

Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.

What are we going to do as automation increases, as computers get more sophisticated? One thing that people say is we'll retrain people, right? We'll take coal miners and turn them into data miners. Of course, we do need to retrain people technically. We need to increase technical literacy, but that's not going to work for everybody.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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