I didn’t​ plan my first tattoo. A few weeks after my mother died, I was in Mexico City in a bar owned by a female mezcal maker with whom I was having an ill-advised fling. There were only a few people there, including the tattoo artist from the studio upstairs. He had his kit with him, and as the evening wore on, and the mezcal continued to flow, people began inking ‘Oaxaca’ on one another.

There are few, if any, forms of dwelling so thick with ideological, political and aesthetic baggage as the high-rise block. For the political right, the usual story, firmly set with the publication of Alice Coleman’s eviscerating book Utopia on Trial in 1985, is one of abject failure.

In October 2002, Biljana Plavšić, biologist and former president of Republika Srpska, made history. The “Iron Lady of the Balkans”, as Madeleine Albright called her, was judged by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to be guilty of persecution – a crime against humanity. Plavšić became the first woman ever to be convicted by an international criminal tribunal.

Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’.

The central theme of Republic and Empire is the imperial character of the American Revolution. The Navigation Acts Britain imposed on the American colonies to help pay for the Seven Years’ War (1756–63); the military support France and Spain gave to Washington’s Continental Army; the experience of Canada, Ireland, Jamaica and the West Indies relative to that of the American colonists; the guns, rifles and ammunition from France and the Austrian Netherlands that American ships purchased from Dutch St Eustatius; and the ramifications of chattel slavery throughout the British Empire – all of these factors affected why and how the revolution unfolded.

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is.

When the regime of Bashar al-Assad started to topple in November 2024, news travelled fast throughout the Syrian diaspora. Activists and analysts organised eleventh-hour meetings. Some wanted to watch developments on social media. Others wanted to talk about all that had been lost in the almost fourteen years of civil war that had raged since 2011.

Originally published in 1886 and reprinted with an introduction by fiction fan Kirsty Logan, these deliciously dark tales have the hallmarks of classic ghost stories.

When Katarína Kucbelová’s fifth poetry collection, k bielej (whitewards), was published in 2022, Slovakia was reeling from one of the world’s worst per capita Covid death rates, fractured by conspiracy theories and shaken by political turmoil sparked by the war in neighbouring Ukraine.

There can be few architectural history books that have come to a more extraordinary conclusion than Islamesque. Its author, Diana Darke, argues that Europe’s Romanesque churches were built not by local masons, but by Arab craftsmen brought from North Africa and the Middle East.