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It’s axiomatic that the people most interested in stories about journalists are other journalists. But it’s appropriate this week to mark the passing of a giant of the craft, Sir Harold Evans, a former editor-in-chief of The Times and Sunday Times. The son of a railway worker who left school at 16, Evans worked his way up from a local weekly to become editor of the Northern Echo at the tender age of 32 before moving to run one the big beasts of Fleet Street. His passion for getting at the truth, no matter how long it may take, led him – as editor of the Sunday Times – to set up that paper’s Insights team of investigative journalists. Major scoops
followed, including exposing Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, sanction busting in the then Rhodesia and uncovering the Thalidomide scandal – which also led to a change in the law governing the reporting of court proceedings.
He also wrote the definitive series of books on the practice of journalism which became – and remain – key primers for anyone starting out in the industry. He was knighted in 2004. Tim Luckhurst, himself a former editor of The Scotsman and BBC reporter, pays tribute to a man he calls “a titan among the greats of British journalism”.
Guerilla graffiti artist Banksy once commented that “copyright is for losers”. Now the elusive street artist has lost a two-year legal battle over trademarks which could open a serious can of worms for all his work.
We’ve also got an answer to one of life’s big questions: why people are sometimes cruel to those who don’t pose any threat to them, from sadists to psychopaths. Talking of which, there’s a new book out which examines the life and reputation of the man about whom they coined the word “sadist” – the Marquis de Sade.
And we’ve been reading about how less routine can be better than helicopter parenting when it comes to encouraging creativity in children, how companies are trying (with varying success) to use apps to create virtual “water coolers” for their staff and why comfy and curved shoe tips can weaken our feet and lead to injuries.
From our colleagues around the world: whether the skin lightener industry has learned from the Black Lives Matter movement and how New Zealand is making its big banks, insurers and other firms disclose their climate risk. And from the US, how the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped shape the modern era of women’s rights – even before she took her seat on the court.
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