In Geoffrey Household’s superlative thriller Rogue Male, from 1939, an English assassin-adventurer takes a potshot at Adolf Hitler and then flees for his life. An assassin’s intended victim is usually a “Hitler” of some sort. In July 2024, in Pennsylvania, an American youth aimed a rifle at Donald Trump from a rooftop and pulled the trigger.

Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy is an illuminating journey through the affective resonances of Christianity’s rites and rituals. Cosima Clara Gillhammer argues that liturgy is not the relic of a bygone age but a living tradition which has shaped the grammar of western culture, from Michelangelo’s Pietà to the Marvel Universe. It is a small treasure of a text.

It’s striking how, in describing a William Blake image entitled Infant Sorrow, a writer would note how its figures inhabit an indoor setting and state how this choice “must be Blake’s way of indicating that weeping and yelling confine and darken the mind.”

Understanding what motivates normal politicians to follow bad economic advice is difficult enough. Are they paying off some special interest, or do they really believe that two plus two equals three? With Donald Trump, the difficulty of interpreting the motivation for his policies sometimes goes to a whole different level.

Most people are aware, even if not knowledgeable, about the history of British imperialism in Africa and the Far East but few will have even heard about British exploits in Latin America.

In early June 1363, Giovanni Boccaccio received a letter that stung him deeply. Just a few days shy of his fiftieth birthday, he was then at the height of his creative powers. He had already penned at least a dozen major works, including the Decameron, any one of which would have assured him a place alongside Dante and Petrarch in the firmament of Italian literature.

G. C. Waldrep’s poetry has always invited readers to “feast” on its byzantine density. That image, the “feast”, appears frequently in his collections (such as the fittingly titled feast gently, 2018); his latest book, The Opening Ritual, also offers an abundance of his characteristically detailed, conceptually vast stanzas.

“I have now found the law of the oak leaves” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal, after pages of worry about the tree’s “difficult” organisation. That difficulty is the result of a fascinating evolutionary inception, which Andrew L. Hipp, herbarium director at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, untangles brilliantly in his new book, Oak Origins: From acorns to species and the tree of life.

Almost all houses, says the architectural historian Owen Hopkins, reflect “received ideas” ingrained in architects, planning bodies, regulations and clients “about how houses are designed and built in particular places at particular moments in time”.

The Italian Renaissance was an age of nomads. Wandering painters, sculptors and workers in precious metals toted their technical skills from one city or court to another, perfectly ready to roll up a canvas, pack a painted panel or wrap a marble bust to be transported long distances down roads, rivers and canals. Everything, it might have seemed, was against them: regime change and warfare in the various duchies and city states, visitations of the plague, exorbitant demands of customs officials, floods, avalanches, brigandage and piracy.