What is the future of health care? Will it have a human face? Or will we all be making appointments to see what Blease calls Dr. Bot, an AI-powered physician.

In terms of literary reputation, Robert Louis Stevenson had a distinctly mixed 20th century, but is doing better in the 21st. Following his death in 1894, he was internationally acclaimed as a writer of at least three imperishable novels (Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped), a handful of great short stories (“Thrawn Janet” chief among them), and another handful of important essays, including “A Humble Remonstrance”, his response to Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction”.

Andrew Lambirth’s approach in The Uglow Papers is a curious one. The art critic and writer eschews a conventional monograph on the British painter Euan Uglow (1932-2000) by bringing together a selection of contributors and, through a series of memoirs or papers, allowing them to speak for themselves.

Richard de Bury, as chancellor and treasurer to Edward III, was lucky enough to see all manner of books. He shared his love of them in Philobiblon, a guide for fellow bibliophiles. But this is how he described what he found in the cabinets and caskets of England’s monasteries in the 14th century:

Is it possible to say anything new about the French Revolution? Perhaps not, unless fresh sources come to light. Whether it might be possible to say something that has been so long forgotten that it appears to be new is a different question, one that John Hardman seeks to answer in this rigorously old-fashioned, explicitly political account of the events that lie ‘at the strategic centre of modern history’.

In the abrasive new world of strongman leaders, international institutions have lost leverage and NGOs have struggled to get a hearing (many illiberal regimes have banned them as alien influences). As the authors of this fascinating book on the Arctic argue, collaborative governance of the global commons has also atrophied.

In 1968, the French politician Pierre Mendès France was interviewed for the film The Sorrow and the Pity. Mendès France – who had escaped from a Vichy prison to join the Free French air force – described what he took to be the absurdity of the spirit in which the last governments of the Third Republic approached military matters before the defeat of 1940, which ended that republic.

We expect our doctors to be demi-gods – flawless, tireless, always right. But they are only human. Increasingly, they are stretched thin, working long hours, under immense pressure, and often with limited resources.

It was two years ago that the Oscar-winning blockbuster ‘Oppenheimer‘ sent the message that it was the Americans, or rather one American in particular, who was responsible for the atomic explosion that brought the Second World War to an explosive close.

Out of the mouths of babes comes the truth unfiltered. With little regard for the sensitivities of the adult world, young children will repeat what they have observed and heard, including a wide range of “swears” (at least in my house). In medieval French fiction and miracle tales, as Julie Singer demonstrates in this new book, a surprising number of infants are imagined as talking such truth to power.