The early reviews of Émile Zola’s twenty- volume “natural and social history” of the Rougon-Macquart family during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, published between 1871 and 1893, bristled with words such as “vulgar”, “indecent” and “coarse”. Henry James decried “the singular foulness of his imagination” and Anatole France declared that no writer had ever “raised such a heap of filth”.

Between the spring of 1936 and February 1939, an unassuming pair of mews houses at 170–2 Warwick Road, in West Kensington, London, became the home of England’s only French art school, the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts.

Miguel Delibes worked as a journalist and novelist throughout Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). He was forced to resign as editor of the Valladolid daily newspaper El norte de Castilla in 1963. The authorities detested his journalistic campaigns against rural poverty. In 1981, with Spain now a democracy, he poured decades of experience and anger into The Holy Innocents, an intense novel set twenty years earlier.

Growing up in south London, Shafik Meghji was transported to South America by books and comics. Now, years later in Buenos Aires, it feels as if he’s back home, what with the weather, “the English-language Buenos Aires Herald on the newsstands, a shuttered Harrods store on the main shopping strip, the nearby Richmond café”.

We were travelling across Poland by train the day after the country’s sensational parliamentary elections in autumn 2023. When news of the results came through, passengers in our compartment fell into each other’s arms, rejoicing as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders.

This book is accessible, interesting, well-priced, and puzzling. As Professor Alec Ryrie acknowledges frankly, both in the book itself and in an excellent Church Times podcast (4 July 2025), he is straying well outside his specialist area of Reformation history by offering a unique take on post-war British culture.

Poet on a Volcano might seem a strange choice of title for the biography of a poet whose Odes were described by George Meredith as “the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants” or “gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape”.

Birth rates are falling in countries across the world, including the US and the UK, as fewer women are willing to raise the number of children their leaders believe are needed to sustain society’s economic growth, demographic stability, even national identity.

Michael Collins begins Blind Corners, a book of essays on photography, with a careful study of a picture most people wouldn’t look at twice. It is a group photo of about one hundred people in a small town in Wales in 1953. Collins describes how he found a negative of the image in a moribund photo studio and restored and printed it with the aid of a high-definition scanner.