More than 300 years before Apollo 11, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a science-fiction fantasy, Somnium, in which a mother and son journey to the Moon and describe the appearance of the Earth from there, complete with observed “phases” akin to the Moon’s own.

Frank Auerbach was right: “There isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.” J. M. W. Turner appears to have seen the world from midair: as viewers of his paintings, we can feel suspended in vortices of swirling wind, snow or smoke.

In an inexplicable moment of synchronicity, this book was brought to my attention as I was drafting an abstract for a conference about my father. A year ago, the idea that I would be developing a scholarly talk about my dad would have been unthinkable.

S0metimes you don’t know what you’ve got till you take another look in the store cupboard. A new collection of Martin Rowson’s writings for Tribune opens up a treasure trove of caustically acerbic railings against the wrongs of the world, especially targeting the ‘craven, incompetent, cruel and callous clowns that lead us’.

Emma Casey’s book, The Return of the Housewife, exposes yet another example of how social media is being used to misinform and manipulate. A reader in sociology at the University of York, Casey strips bare TikTok, Instagram, other digital sources flooded with images of “cleanfluencers” — women cleaning, tidying, putting things right, and linked to the concept of a life of love, contentment, self-care and positive thinking.

In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops.

Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex.

Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter.

Few architectural styles are as familiar to European eyes as the Romanesque. Although there are many different regional variations, you are never very far from an identifiably Romanesque building, no matter where you live. Most of us can probably pick out the essential characteristics: rounded arches, massive walls and so on – all things that we associate with the legacy of Rome. But is it really as ‘European’ as it seems?

When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.