Using handmade needles and thread, Lucie Kamusekera has recorded the decades of conflict she has lived through in the Congo

She could hear the sounds of artillery. “I have no idea how I am still alive,” says Lucie Kamusekera. When the city of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, fell to a rebel offensive in early 2025, the 82-year-old artist was hiding at home.

Kamusekera, 82, stitches scenes of contemporary Congolese history on to tobacco sacks

The 70-metre-long cloth about the Norman invasion has not been seen in England since it was created in 11th century

The Bayeux tapestry will be insured for an estimated £800m when it returns to the UK in 2026 for the first time in more than 900 years.

The Treasury will insure the 70-metre embroidered cloth, which depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings, for damage or loss during its transfer from France and while it is on display at the British Museum from September.

Most metros use plastic or metal, but the distinctive fabrics on London’s network are full of clues to its history

When I first came to London from Yorkshire in the late 1980s, I found the tube replete with bizarre novelties. Among them was the way most trains required me to sit sideways to the direction of travel, as on a fairground waltzer. Directly opposite me was another person or an empty seat, and while I knew not to stare at people, I did stare at the seats – at their woollen coverings, called moquette. I have since written two books about them, the first nonfiction, Seats of London, and now a crime novel, The Moquette Mystery.

I was attracted to moquette firstly because it, like me, came from Yorkshire (most of it back then was woven in Halifax), and whereas many foreign metros have seats of plastic or steel, moquette made the tube cosy. Yet it seemed underappreciated. The index of the standard history of the tube, for instance, proceeds blithely from Moorgate to Morden.

Irish fashion designer whose linen dresses were a staple of Princess Diana’s wardrobe

Paul Costelloe had a very Irish career. He learned and practised fashion internationally as a migrant in Paris, Milan and New York, and designed for such British institutions as Diana, Princess of Wales, and British Airways at its 1990s zenith.

But he was rooted in the island of Ireland’s terroir, appreciating its fibres, wool and, especially, linen, by fingertip feel as much as eye. Fashion only rediscovered linen after synthetics lost appeal with the oil price shock of the mid 70s. For Ireland, and Costelloe, linen was always an essential resource.