The first jail I ever set foot in was one of the worst in the western world. Pelican Bay State Prison sits on the picturesque California coast, 350 miles north of San Francisco. One of the supermax facilities spawned by the US prison-industrial complex in the 1980s, it is a sprawling 275-acre compound with an X-shaped cluster of concrete buildings at its heart, containing more than 1,000 cells designed for indefinite solitary confinement.

Two literary-historical paths diverged in a wood. One, the story of fairy tales lined with names such as Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, is familiar to us. The other, the path that Anne E. Duggan treads in The Lost Princess, is paved with names most readers will not recognize: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force and Henriette-Julie de Murat, among others. But this more obscure route was not always the path less travelled.

A few days before Christmas in 1910, a gang of Latvian anarchists (nobody knows exactly how many were involved) tried to tunnel their way into a jeweller’s shop on Houndsditch in London. Had they been successful they would have escaped with a haul worth, in today’s terms, more than a million pounds – money they could have used to fund the struggle against tsarist repression back home. Instead they were interrupted after a neighbour noticed the noise they were making.

During the Nazi Protectorate in Czechoslovakia, which lasted from 1939 to 1945, every radio had a stiff red card slotted in front of its speaker. It showed that the radio had been inspected by an official and that its capacity to pick up shortwave broadcasts from overseas had been removed. The card also issued a threatening reminder: “Remember, remember, that listening to foreign radio is banned and punishable by prison or even death”.

We’ve all felt it. The urge to zoom-in, look-up, take a snapshot of or otherwise possess the world via the screen in front of us. The inalienable itch to get right to the heart of things without delay, to wholly absorb some relatively insignificant subfield of information right now.

In May 1896, Nicholas II was crowned the last emperor of Russia in Moscow. An elaborately choreographed and opulent display hosted in a Kremlin cathedral affirmed that he was divinely ordained with absolute, autocratic power. Part man and part god. From that moment on, Nicholas was considered all but omnipotent.

When Franz Kafka died on 3 June 1924, he had published just a few collections of short prose, none of them to much acclaim. The majority of the writing for which he is now known and celebrated, such as the novels The Trial and The Castle, were left unfinished and published posthumously thanks to Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod, who defied Kafka’s instructions to burn the manuscripts.

Readers have never known what to make of Barbara Comyns. The strange mixture of cheerful irreverence and raw misery in her writing makes it easy to dismiss her as a one-off eccentric or a battle-scarred version of Daisy Ashford. But her air of faux-naïf menace is not just a matter of personal peculiarity. It reflects the experience of a dislocated generation.

But you’ve killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’

For a people in large measure defined by history, with a culture that reveres great leaders, the relative obscurity of Chaim Weizmann is a mystery. Ask the average Jew on the Clapham (perhaps that should be Borehamwood) omnibus who should take the most credit for the founding of Israel and they’ll likely say Herzl or Ben-Gurion. Weizmann rarely gets a look in.