The title of Hannah Regel’s assured debut novel presumably alludes to Angela Carter’s description of the potter Michael Cardew as “the last sane man in a crazy world”. Two of Regel’s three female characters are aspiring ceramicists. Neither achieve Cardew’s fame. The Last Sane Woman is a study in artistic endeavour, disappointment and envy.

When one thinks of D-Day, June 6th 1944, the first images that spring to mind are of brave soldiers disembarking landing craft and rushing onto the beaches to face the machine-guns of the defending Germans. Films, such as Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day have enhanced those images.

Serbia is modern Europe’s odd man out. Today, this small Balkan country sits comfortably outside the European Union and NATO, at a time when nearly every other European country is either a member or aspiring member of both. Its people would seemingly sooner be engulfed by the institutional West than ever be a part of it.

I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Abiy Ahmed.” The message flashed up from someone I had been told to call Napoleon. It was the middle of 2023, six years after I had first arrived in Ethiopia, and one year after I had left, in the midst of a war which was tearing it apart. Ethiopia was lurching from crisis to crisis, and behind each of them loomed one figure larger than any other: the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.

‘Attention’, in art historian Claire Bishop’s deft examination of post-1990s contemporary art, is in all kinds of trouble. That’s the result, in large part, of digital networks and the new culture of mediation, in which the space between reality, experience and image is collapsed via social media.

It’s a balmy, Parisian evening in 2011, and I’ve been on one of my favourite walks past Père Lachaise, that grand city within a cemetery, to meet Gilles Peterson and friends at Mama Shelter. I had been living and DJ’ing in Paris for seven years and, call it loyalty or tradition, whenever Gilles was on the radio I emailed in for a shout out, and if he was in town, I made the trip to see him, Rob Gallagher, Sean Rollins and the Brownswood record label crew.

Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Serbia is a wounded country. Its past overflows with legends of gallant resistance and glorious triumph. Yet Serbian nationalism is animated by the grievances of defeat. The Turks conquered and degraded it. NATO bombed it. The European Union spurns it. Serbia’s neighbors, from Croatia to Hungary, have been accepted into Europe; Serbia, however, continues to be stigmatized as the instigator of World War I and memorialized as the cause of the last genocide on European soil in the 20th century.

Edith Sitwell, aristo-poet and dreary snob, whose 17th-century ancestral home came with vast gardens and staff to tend them, once described working-class novelist DH Lawrence as looking like “a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden”. Then, as now, “suburban” is reserved for special horticultural disdain in Britain.

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit.