Side by side these two books appear counter-intuitive. The defender of legalised assisted dying is a well-known Jewish rabbi, whereas its strident adversary is a secular philosopher.

One of the most common assumptions within the social science is that the more that societies grow, develop and industrialise the less religious and the more secular they will be. And in the initial decades of, say, the western industrialised nations there was a fair amount of evidence to support this as an overall thesis.

Murky Water is a meticulously researched analysis of the state of the water industry in England and Wales, and outlines possible ways forward.

Bishops come and go, “like snow upon the desert’s dusty face”, leaving little behind. Dunstans, Beckets, Cranmers, and Lauds are few and far between. This is also true of the later Middle Ages, when few but historians can think of a name, apart from the founders of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war.  Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text.

Being underestimated​ was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. Her earliest talent was for invisibility. To the men who surrounded her father, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was a gloomy, awkward girl.

Xandra Bingley’s first collection of short stories, Ways of Telling, is written in a distinctive style. It presents a series of memorable vignettes that feature workaday concerns, interior monologues and a jubilant disregard for the norms of standard punctuation.

When Mike Pickering became resident DJ at the Hacienda in Manchester it was an arts venue where people often sat around listening to poetry. But he helped turn it into a cathedral of the acid house movement, packed to its black and yellow pillars with people raving, covered in sweat, with eyes like saucers.

Of the many books published about revolutions, some begin in ancient times and move forward, while others are the work of multiple contributors who explore a common theme. The majority, though, are individual works that do not look back further than the seventeenth century.

Although it is often claimed that religion was the main force preventing the advancement of medical knowledge and the practice of proper medicine in the Middle Ages, the Church actually played an important part in educating the laity — and perhaps especially the illiterate — about their bodies.