She was, according to US wartime counter-intelligence officer Lt Paul Jensen, “our No 1 contact in French Morocco”, supporting the allied mission “at great risk to her own life – and I mean that literally. We would have been quite helpless without her.”

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America.

The morning after Edward VII was crowned King of Great Britain and Emperor of India in Westminster Abbey, Canon Welldon treated the colonial troops who had attended the ceremony to a valedictory sermon. An Old Etonian and a former headmaster of Harrow who had until recently been bishop of Calcutta, Welldon was the embodiment of upper-class and imperial purpose.

More than 300 years before Apollo 11, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a science-fiction fantasy, Somnium, in which a mother and son journey to the Moon and describe the appearance of the Earth from there, complete with observed “phases” akin to the Moon’s own.

Frank Auerbach was right: “There isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.” J. M. W. Turner appears to have seen the world from midair: as viewers of his paintings, we can feel suspended in vortices of swirling wind, snow or smoke.

In an inexplicable moment of synchronicity, this book was brought to my attention as I was drafting an abstract for a conference about my father. A year ago, the idea that I would be developing a scholarly talk about my dad would have been unthinkable.

S0metimes you don’t know what you’ve got till you take another look in the store cupboard. A new collection of Martin Rowson’s writings for Tribune opens up a treasure trove of caustically acerbic railings against the wrongs of the world, especially targeting the ‘craven, incompetent, cruel and callous clowns that lead us’.

Emma Casey’s book, The Return of the Housewife, exposes yet another example of how social media is being used to misinform and manipulate. A reader in sociology at the University of York, Casey strips bare TikTok, Instagram, other digital sources flooded with images of “cleanfluencers” — women cleaning, tidying, putting things right, and linked to the concept of a life of love, contentment, self-care and positive thinking.

In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops.

Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex.