Sasha Simic

At the start of the Great Miners' Strike in March 1984 Nottinghamshire's coal-mining industry was second in size only to Yorkshire's with 32,000 employed in the pits. But of those, less than 2,000 workers stayed out for the duration of the year-long strike.

Harry Patterson's useful history of the strike in Nottinghamshire asks why the majority of its miners scabbed.

When the Nottinghamshire miners were balloted in mid-March on whether to join the action with the rest of the NUM, only one in four Notts miners voted to back it.

In this, his 50th anniversary year, Doctor Who has become a contested figure. The right think he's one of them. The Daily Mail, for example, sees him as an embodiment of "traditional values".

"What finer example of a man - brave, reflective, with a keen sense of heroic duty - is there than Doctor Who?" it writes. And it's true that there are aspects of the character the right are happy with.

The Doctor is an aristocrat from a fantasy super-Britain. His home planet, Gallifrey, is a combination of Eton, Oxbridge and parliament on steroids.

Whatever else the long-gone "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" was, it was multicultural. Established in 1945, it was made up of six republics and populated by 22 different ethnicities, including Muslim Slavs, Albanians, Jews, ethnic Germans, Turks, Vlachs and Hungarians. It had three major religions, two alphabets, three official languages and a variety of minority languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian and Roma.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917, which ended the situation of dual power in favour of the workers' councils (soviets), was never intended to be confined within Russia's borders.

Germany, as one of Europe's most industrially advanced nations, was seen as a key battleground for the future. And almost a year after Russia's revolution the Bolshevik strategy was vindicated by the German Revolution of November 1918. Initially the German Revolution seemed to replay events in Russia, but with the prospect of a far easier transition to full workers' power.

In Bring Up The Bodies, Hilary Mantel returns to the court of Henry VIII and the life of his foremost administrator, Thomas Cromwell, which she evoked so brilliantly in her last novel, Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall covered the eight years in which the "King's great matter" of his divorce from Katherine of Aragon ran its course. Bring Up The Bodies spans a much more concentrated period of just eight months and ends with the execution of Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers in May 1536.

Trieste tells the story of the only concentration camp with a crematorium on Italian soil. It was built in the spring of 1944 at the Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice mill in a suburb of Trieste.

Trieste sat at the crossroads of Italian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Slavic cultures and was a richly multilingual and multicultural melting-pot. It is bitterly ironic that it became a site of Nazi mass murder.

This is a very peculiar film that pulls off something of an artistic coup.

It's both an obsequious, servile, heritage heavy glorification of a recent British monarch and also a deeply critical study of the royal family and of monarchy in general.

It's the story of how Albert Frederick Arthur George Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was born the Duke of York and died King George VI, struggled to lose his paralysing stammer - a handicap which in an age of mass communication made him a liability and an embarrassment to the royal family.

The bourgeois press don't know what to make of Ransome and the "problem" of his attachment to the Russian Revolution. If they could view history from the perspective of the working class, they would see there is no "great mystery" as to why he endorsed the revolution and gave the early soviets his wholehearted support. He recognised it for what it was - the self-liberation of the poorest and most oppressed people on the planet.

At this year's Marxism conference the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek tried to illustrate a point about the political weakness of the left with an old Balkan joke which involved a rape. The joke was meant as an allegory, but Zizek got into trouble with some in the audience who objected to his casual use of such a traumatic subject.

There is a wonderful statue of Georges Jacques Danton in the Carrefour de l'Odéon in Paris reputedly raised on the very spot where his front door would have opened onto the streets in the early 1790s.

Danton deserves a statue. He was central to the progress of the great French Revolution. He was a founder member of the Cordelier Club, which was firmly anchored to the street politics of the Parisian poor, and a leading member of the Jacobin Club which provided the revolution with its radical ideology.