He has shot everyone from Madonna to Rihanna, Kate Moss and Frank Ocean. Now Walker has turned his lens on the activists, artists, writers, models and everyday heroes of gay life

Six years ago, Tim Walker was walking in the Highbury Fields area of London when he came across a plaque on the side of a building. In 1970, at these now-converted public toilets, Louis Eakes, chairman of the Young Liberals, was arrested for importuning following a “pretty police” entrapment in which male officers posed as would-be sex partners.

It was here, the plaque told the photographer, that the first ever gay rights demonstration in Britain had taken place, organised by the Gay Liberation Front, in protest at Eakes’s arrest. But Walker was jolted by the date: 27 November 1970. It was the day he was born. So he wondered: “Who were those people out marching that day? Where are they now?”

On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the clock started ticking

Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently.

He went out to the dredger, a squat barge that hauls silt and other debris from the marina floor on to a flat deck that resembles a steel sieve. Sitting on the deck was a huge hunk of metal, caked in mud and stones. As Hockings-Thompson got closer and saw its distinctive conical shape, he knew it was a bomb – a big one. The dredger was loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, so if the bomb detonated, it would be disastrous. He called the police, who quickly came to the scene. “And then,” he said, “all hell broke loose.”

Accusations of classism chime with my experience 20 years ago. So all hail the Bristol graduate awarding state schools red plaques

“So, where did you go to school?” On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like a loaded question. I was mostly bemused when I first started university 20 years ago and found myself being asked it repeatedly by other students. Why were they so interested? Surely no one would have heard of the north Wales comprehensive I had attended? When they countered my baffled reaction with “Charterhouse” or “Marlborough”, how was I supposed to respond? When one student said, of another, “He went to Winchester, you know”, I stared blankly at him, not understanding why he was telling me about someone else’s day trip to a city in Hampshire (“Oh, did he have a nice time?”). It was strange, new territory.

Asking someone where they went to school is often not an innocent question. It is a way of “placing” you on a social scale. As thousands of freshers settle in to their first terms at university, a significant proportion will be battling with this dawning awareness that Britain runs on a network of private schools whose alumni often seem to know, or know of, one another. State-school students might have been dimly aware of it before, but nothing puts it into sharper focus than freshers’ week. It’s clear that little has changed since my own student days. I was saddened to read recent reports of classism at St Andrews, which led to a student’s announcement that she would not return this academic year: “Working-class students have been made to feel ashamed of their home life at university,” she said. The pervasiveness of private school culture, as I suppose you could call it, remains nationwide and deeply embedded.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

The actor and his sister were with the 10-year-old on the night he was murdered. For the first time, along with the caretaker who found him bleeding, they share their terror – and celebrate their friend

Next month marks 26 years since the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor prompted a wave of grief and incredulity across the UK. Damilola had arrived in London from Nigeria just a few months earlier, with his mother, Gloria, his brother, Tunde, and his sister, Gbemi. His father, Richard, remained in Lagos, intending – like the patriarchs of many diasporic families – to join his wife and children at a later date. But that reunion would never come.

On 27 November 2000, while en route from the local library to the family’s home on the North Peckham Estate in south London, Damilola was set upon by the brothers Ricky and Danny Preddie, 13 and 12 respectively. He was attacked with a glass bottle, severing the femoral artery in his left leg, and was found bleeding heavily in a stairwell. Shortly after, Damilola was pronounced dead at nearby King’s College hospital.

‘When I couldn’t do the spitting scene, Sean took me aside and said: “Ron, if you don’t actually spit in my face, we’ll be here all day.” So I let one fly – and kept having to redo it’

I read an article about a curious book that had great reviews in Italy, a murder mystery about monks in the middle ages fighting for the fictional missing part of Aristotle’s Poetics. I said: “This is for me.” Since childhood, I had been fascinated with medieval and religious architecture, and Aristotle’s Poetics is my favourite literary work.

Breathable bedding, slanted tweezers and an indispensable garlic press … here are the buys you wish you’d discovered sooner. Plus, the best walking poles, tested

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Sometimes a product changes your life – or, more likely, just makes your day 10% better.

Whether it’s something small-but-mighty (a gadget that helps you open a jar without swearing, tweezers that get every hair) or a more expensive item that has proved its worth over the years (a much-loved designer dress, a garden mulch-maker), we asked you to tell us about the buys that have made your life just a little bit better.

Researchers, who looked at UK, US and Dutch data, say lifestyle choices are costing thousands of lives a year

Cases of seven types of cancer have risen sharply among younger people in England, major new research has found, prompting warnings that lifestyle choices are costing thousands of lives each year.

The number of people under 50 diagnosed with prostate cancer in England has quadrupled since 2001, while early onset bowel, kidney and uterine cancer diagnoses more than doubled.

European Green party says motion goes against its policy, with German Green co-leader calling it ‘intolerable and unacceptable’

• Zack Polanski may rue lack of leadership when Greens needed him to act

The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.

The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.

Publisher says author died peacefully at home ‘between writing sessions’

Jeffrey Archer, the bestselling author and former MP whose political career ended in disgrace when he was imprisoned for perjury, has died at the age of 86.

Archer, who was a Conservative MP for five years before serving as the party’s deputy chair, died “suddenly and peacefully” at his home “between writing sessions” on Monday, his publisher HarperCollins said.

British banker Simon Andriesz helped to expose alleged ties between late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick

A top UK regulator has launched an investigation into how it handled a whistleblower – who highlighted alleged ties between the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick – after he took his own life.

The British banker Simon Andriesz died late last month aged 57, the campaign group Transparency Task Force, of which he was a member, confirmed over the weekend.