Birth rates are falling in countries across the world, including the US and the UK, as fewer women are willing to raise the number of children their leaders believe are needed to sustain society’s economic growth, demographic stability, even national identity.

Michael Collins begins Blind Corners, a book of essays on photography, with a careful study of a picture most people wouldn’t look at twice. It is a group photo of about one hundred people in a small town in Wales in 1953. Collins describes how he found a negative of the image in a moribund photo studio and restored and printed it with the aid of a high-definition scanner.

Publishing used to be a dirty business. I’m talking not only about the ink-stained fingers of disreputable writers, but also about the filthy hands of those who actually put the words on the page: the devils and cutters who worked with metal type.

This is a compelling and timely book. It is compelling, because the reader shares Mark Vernon’s sense of excitement as he delves deeper and deeper into William Blake’s imaginative world and the way in which Blake’s visionary poetry also gives us vision: helps us see more deeply into the dilemmas and mysteries both of our own lives and the age in which we live.

‘The moon wanes and waxes, it is never steadfast’, wrote the author of Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century guide for English anchoresses, ‘and signifies therefore worldly things that are as the moon ever changing.’ For anchorites immured in their cells, the moon represented everything they had rejected, the material pleasures and temptations they had overcome.

It’s twenty years since James Shapiro published 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which fused literary criticism with political and social history in bravura fashion. Shapiro vigorously debunked the Romantic notion that Shakespeare was an artist who transcended his own era.

Once the province of the art historian, the country house has become the focus of all manner of scholarly investigations over the past forty or fifty years. Everything from the economics of estate management and the lives of domestic servants to the Jewish country house, the queer country house and the country house’s links to colonialism has come under scrutiny.

Britain isn’t working – for different reasons, voters across the political spectrum affirm this view. You don’t need to subscribe to the more dystopian accounts of the country’s state to recognise its validity.

As the title suggests, Williams focuses on the period after the Western-inspired regime change which led to the assassination of Muammar Gadaffi and threw Libya into years of turmoil and destruction.

‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’