Every year, at the end of October, India observes National Unity Day, celebrating the integration of the separate territories of the colonial period into one unified nation. Not everyone joins in. Last year a separate “felicitation event” took place in Ahmedabad, where thirty former princes gathered to lament the sacrifice of their dynasties – within a few years of the British leaving India in 1947, more than 560 princely states lost their independence as the new republic emerged.

CS Lewis and John Betjeman had a famously strained relationship. While the Chronicles of Narnia author dismissed his then-student at Oxford as an “idle prig”, the future poet laureate went on to thank, in the preface of one of his collections, “Mr CS Lewis for the fact on page 256” – even though the book had only 45 pages.

Last October a broad liberal coalition led by Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, took Europe by surprise when it ousted Poland’s national-populist Law and Justice (PiS) party from power after eight years in charge. Newspapers trumpeted the country’s “return to Europe” as liberals looked to Tusk’s victory for a “blueprint” on how to turn back the tide of populism.

The world in which this biography opens saw itself on the edge of a nervous breakdown, driven to distraction by technology, the pressure of work and chemical stimulants, provoking an epidemic of mental health problems that in the case of our subject led to severe paranoia regarding viral infections.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) is a much-studied personality, his journals and writings giving historians such tasty fodder that it might seem difficult to present a fresh view of this unruly genius. Roberta Olson lives and breathes Audubon in the New-York Historical Society’s climate-controlled chambers, where all of his original paintings are housed in her care as curator of drawings emerita.

What are maps? Who uses them and for what purposes? For anyone who feels these questions are too simplistic to engage with, then reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never look at a map in the same way again.

Readers may rightly wonder why NATO, so pre-eminent as Europe’s security foundation, is so timid in its response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. To fully grasp this, we need to look back to NATO’s perhaps greatest achievement, namely its ability to retool itself after the end of the Cold War and how its achievement continues to shape NATO policy today.

When Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was first performed in London in 1955, the play had only been running for ten minutes or so when a member of the audience shouted ‘This is why we lost the colonies!’

In December 2021, the philosopher Yitzhak Melamed posted on social media a letter that he had received from the rabbi of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Melamed had written requesting permission to film there for a documentary on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had been emphatically expelled by the 17th-century Jewish community.

For many people reading this, the analogy will seem ludicrous, but hear me out: if the Conservative party was one of your friends, you’d be very worried about them.