Yesterday I was in Mr. Jones’s church to help get everything ready for this evening. A vicar from Leicester will be giving a lecture on the Reformation and illustrating it with a magic lantern showing scenes from that period. I’ve already seen some of the plates, they’re in the manner of Holbein.

My guess is you keep across the news. You know Andy Mountbatten-Windsor has just had the worst birthday ever; that tall hotels in Dubai don’t make for a great holiday right now; and that Keir Starmer’s engagements diary for 2027 will be remarkably clear.

Inscribed in Latin​ on a large floor slab in the chapel of Eton College is a memorial to a former provost, Sir Henry Wotton, who died, aged 71, in December 1639: ‘Here lies the first author of this sentiment: The itch of disputation is the scab of the churches. Inquire his name elsewhere.’

Frida Kahlo’s face and art are recognised worldwide, but that was not always the case. “How and why did this evolution happen?” asks Mari Carmen Ramírez, the lead curator of the exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (until 17 May), in this accompanying catalogue.

This is a whole new genre – a kind of Netflix-style academic book which reads scenically yet delivers a powerful historical analysis, fully referenced.

Five hundred years ago, in February 1526, some six thousand copies of William Tyndale’s complete New Testament of the Bible were printed at a press in the imperial city of Worms in Germany. Today, as we celebrate the quincentennial, there are only two copies known to have survived the banning and burning of his work in England.

In August 1931 Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, faced the greatest calamity of his political career. He survived it – and remained in 10 Downing Street for nearly four more years – but at a heavy cost.

Kathleen Harriman’s letters are particularly revealing on account of their omissions and misapprehensions. The youngest daughter of millionaire tycoon Averell Harriman, she was well schooled in diplomacy, accompanying him to London, where he served as Roosevelt’s special envoy, and to Moscow when he became US ambassador to Russia.

Thomas Arundel was archbishop of Canterbury from 1396 until his death in 1414, and five times lord chancellor of England. He was the archetypal political bishop. He was the youngest son of the tenth earl of Arundel, one of the richest and most powerful men in England.

Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than nearly any other living Chinese author.