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.

One of the women in this pairing is world-famous, but the other proves more interesting, in this book published to accompany an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Minneapolis in 1891, Mary Reynolds moved to Paris in 1921, after her husband’s death in France shortly after the First World War.

On a visit to Cairo in 1047, the Persian scholar Nasir-i Khusraw attended a feast at the court of al-Mustansir, the eighth Fatimid caliph and ruler of Egypt (1036–94). Nasir later recounted that the royal hall had been decorated with thousands of confectionery sculptures, including an ornamental orange tree with branches and leaves crafted entirely from sugar.

Thirty years after William Wordsworth died, the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley walked around Grasmere chatting to the locals and seeking memories of the great poet. To Rawnsley, a late 19th-century man of letters, this must have seemed a rich seam to hack into because Wordsworth had by then been lionised as a giant of English poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson is chiefly remembered for the creation of the archetypal Jekyll and Hyde (1886), so strangely or perhaps not so strangely foreshadowing the crimes of Jack the Ripper, and for his tales of boyhood adventure – Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893).

One word appeared in almost every headline about the tragic story of Constance Marten’s baby, and it was not “manslaughter”. Marten was, in the eyes of journalists, an “aristocrat”, and had she not been brought up in a large country house, on an estate that had belonged to her family since the sixteenth century, her trial would never have provoked such frenzied interest.

As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months.

Marc Lynch is angry. The word ‘rage’ appears six times on the first page, and comes in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. This should be sufficient warning to anyone expecting a cool, calm, dispassionate analysis of the Middle East that they might have picked up the wrong book.

“Opera and ballet will be at the heart of the culture of many people who live in London and the south of England,” former Conservative minister Jake Berry (now a member of Reform UK) once told parliament. “But for many of us in the north it is our local football club – our Glyndebourne, Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House or Royal Shakespeare Company will be Blackburn Rovers, Accrington Stanley, Barrow, Carlisle or Sunderland.”