Frankincense, the ancient resin known for its spiritual and cultural significance, is facing challenges in a rapidly modernising Oman. Meet Khaled Saif, the country’s first frankincense sommelier, who is on a mission to preserve this historic trade for future generations.

In celebration of these great women, I have put together a list of 25 inspiring quotes by some of these charismatic women leaders.

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the  southern sky, make this statement from the heart: 

Judicial writing can be a beautiful thing. In “resoundingly acquitting'“ the accused, the court said:

The senior judiciary of England and Wales found itself in the dock towards the end of last year as it faced twin accusations of systemic racism and bullying.

A study by the University of Manchester and Keir Monteith KC revealed that court users believed judges are “just as racist as our police forces, our education system and our health service”.

This finding came after reports in The Times of widespread allegations of bullying made by junior members of the judiciary against their senior colleagues.

Charlotte Ivers is a brilliant 28-year-old columnist for The Times. I actually read this expecting to roll my eyes, thinking what does a 28-year-old know? But it’s possibly one of the best articles I’ve read in The Times for ages:

Who would have known that originally all “Crowners” were knights of the realm? Coroners performed many interesting duties down through the ages. They witnessed trials by ordeal and trials by combat. Coroners also investigated the finding of “treasure troves”, the discovery of “wrecks of the sea” and the catching of royal fish “the whale and the sturgeon”. They also investigated fires, including non-fatal ones. A major consideration in all of these investigations was financial, designed to boost the coffers of the King. So where did it all begin?

Marcus Elliott is a coroner based in Christchurch. Before that he was a barrister at Canterbury Chambers practising in civil and criminal litigation. He was counsel assisting the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission in 2011-12. He was appointed a coroner in 2015.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political scientist, two centuries ago observed in his book Democracy in America that “there is scarcely any political question in the United States that does not ultimately resolve itself into a judicial question”.

In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.

Britain’s two most senior judges have quit Hong Kong’s top bench amid mounting concerns over the territory’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists.

As feminists are vilified online and politicians try and fail to describe what a woman is, the rest of us are entitled to ask how we got ourselves into this mess and how we can navigate a sensible route out of it, says Lucy Bannerman. Published in The Times.

Tolerance of dissenting opinion was the sign of a free society. Now there’s a battle over the meaning of words. Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. This article originally appeared in the 50th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship magazine, which was published on Mar 15.