For more than 500 years people have tried to map Utopia. The first attempt appeared in 1516, illustrating Thomas More’s account of a perfectionist human community, for which he coined the word (and concept) of utopia. The map shows a crescent-shaped island with cities scattered unevenly around its ragged coastlines.

The average Observer reader might be unfamiliar with contemporary tabloid newspapers, but in this informative – if overlong – survey of that subsection of journalism, Terry Kirby studies everyone from Daniel Defoe to Rupert Murdoch, ruthlessly dissecting their venality and opportunism.

This book offers a challenge. John Stewart, a retired architect now an architectural historian, encourages us when we walk the city streets to raise our eyes to parapet level and open our minds to the incredible ornamental detail and range of symbols that bedeck major public and institutional buildings. 

What an incredibly timely book this is. The authors, featuring Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson and Danny Dorling, are a collective of leading figures from academia, politics and industry who share a common belief in the need for pragmatic reform to end our crisis.

Journalist Mihir Bose has produced a fascinating book chronicling his life: growing up in India, then moving to Britain, where he eventually works his way into journalism.

In Switzerland’s Rhône Valley, nestled in a landscape of vineyards, orchards and meadows, stands the Château de Muzot – a small fortified manor dating back to the thirteenth century. In the early 1920s this quadrangular two-storey structure, topped with a stepped gable roof, was purchased and restored by an affluent philanthropist, Werner Reinhart. Thanks to Reinhart’s patronage, it is here that Rainer Maria Rilke retreated in the aftermath of the First World War.

Who was Thomas Müntzer, asks Andrew Drummond. Was he, as Martin Luther suggested, a “ravening wolf”, a “false prophet” who stirred up rebellion and bloodshed? (Each chapter opens with a juicy piece of invective by a member of Luther’s Wittenberg team). Or was Müntzer, as his admirers have suggested, a hero of the downtrodden, a harbinger of spiritual, social, and political equality?

Fifty years ago the writer and former prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship and deported from the Soviet Union. He had been charged with treason, but his principal crime was to have authorized the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris some months earlier. As a reviewer wrote in these pages under the heading “The country of Gulag” (TLS, February 22, 1974), Solzhenitsyn’s book would “survive as one of the bravest and finest of mankind’s bequests to posterity”.

Not long before he died in 2004, Paul Foot wrote an obituary of his friend Tony Cliff, with whom he worked for many years on the Socialist Worker. “Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration.”

In the 1940s, a refugee from Nazi Germany called Nikolaus Pevsner started travelling round the lanes and streets of England, armed with sheaves of notes compiled in advance from lengthy research, cataloguing the noteworthy structures in meticulous-going-on-obsessive detail. It was an outsider’s act of love for his adopted country, a homage to the recently imperilled heritage of a nation that had survived war.