Among the treasures of the British Library is an unassuming manuscript identified by the shelfmark MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. Named after its early-modern collector, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Roman emperor whose bust once sat atop its shelf in Cotton’s library, the manuscript is a little smaller than seven inches long and five inches wide, the size of a very small paperback.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron consists of 100 stories divided between ten narrators, all Florentines who have withdrawn to the countryside to hide out from the Black Death. The ninth tale told on the sixth day features Guido Cavalcanti, “one of the best logicians in the world and an excellent natural philosopher … a very elegant and cultivated man and very fluent in his speech”.

Why is Catholicism sexy again? The sudden surge in interest, especially among younger people, can be traced back to several sources. One is superficial, an aesthetic engagement: the Met Gala in 2018, where Rihanna wore a beaded minidress and papal tiara; or the “Hot Priest” in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, “only in it for the outfits”.

Christian missionaries were central to European colonialism, providing a cloak of justice and moral authority, a model of “civilised” expansionism and colonial oversight of subjugated peoples. Governments, traders and explorers exploited this aura of ethical responsibility of Christian civilisation to the “heathen.” In England’s imperial adventures it was the Church of England that played a key role.

Imaginary places, as the Hungarian architect Ákos Moravánszky observed, are invested with strong identities. He gave the example of the Kingdom of Oz – it is a place that does not exist, but everyone knows how it differs from Kansas. Central Europe is another such place, a region that has no formal boundaries or definition, yet refuses stubbornly to disappear.

Histories​ of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin.

Last year, amid the riots that followed the Southport murders, the great sage Elon Musk prophesied that civil war in Britain was “inevitable”. So far, he’s been proved wrong, but then prophets can claim they’re just not correct yet. A year on, such talk has surged.

The early reviews of Émile Zola’s twenty- volume “natural and social history” of the Rougon-Macquart family during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, published between 1871 and 1893, bristled with words such as “vulgar”, “indecent” and “coarse”. Henry James decried “the singular foulness of his imagination” and Anatole France declared that no writer had ever “raised such a heap of filth”.

Between the spring of 1936 and February 1939, an unassuming pair of mews houses at 170–2 Warwick Road, in West Kensington, London, became the home of England’s only French art school, the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts.

Miguel Delibes worked as a journalist and novelist throughout Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). He was forced to resign as editor of the Valladolid daily newspaper El norte de Castilla in 1963. The authorities detested his journalistic campaigns against rural poverty. In 1981, with Spain now a democracy, he poured decades of experience and anger into The Holy Innocents, an intense novel set twenty years earlier.