We are sometimes inclined to compare our own imperfect times with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century: global elites wielding extraordinary political and economic power, a yawning gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, cities plagued with shocking inequalities.

In seventeenth-century England, people often commented after a meal: “We ourselves have had ourselves upon our trenchers”. This is an early version of today’s well-worn aphorism, ‘you are what you eat’. In Eating and Being, historian Steven Shapin explores this idea and how philosophies of food have shaped the Western sense of self.

Misogyny and male supremacy might lie at the heart of far-right ideology but that does not mean women are absent from such movements – with some caught up in the race riots that exploded across the UK this summer.

Carlsberg, the brewing giant whose presence in Russia transformed that country’s beverage market, has left. What remains is the lingering residue of a boozy party that peaked too soon, ended in a brawl and left many questions dangling.

One of the most celebrated political cartoonists of our age, Martin Rowson has a decades-long written record of equally skilful takedowns of the world’s many hypocrisies and hypocrites, proving to the detractors that cartoonists can write. Shock, horror!

As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.

Norman Holmes Pearson was a familiar mid-twentieth-century academic: a popular teacher, active committee member and organizer of conferences who never quite finished his major book. He spent his life in the Yale English department, and collected rare books and manuscripts, while fostering relationships with poets, colleagues and students at home and abroad. Born into New England’s upper-middle class, he married into the wealthy Win­chester rifle family. When Greg Barnhisel began this biography, a colleague asked: “Why would you want to write about him?”

As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.

It is almost obligatory for a review of a book about Robert Hooke to characterise him as ‘overlooked’ or even ‘forgotten’, and to complain of his eclipse by Newton. The most melodramatic authors will add the story – entirely spurious – that Newton ordered the destruction of Hooke’s portrait upon assuming the presidency of the Royal Society in 1703. In fact, Hooke has never been forgotten.

Martin Rowson is one of Britain’s best-known satirical cartoonists. He is also a writer and his essays and columns – including for Tribune, the Guardian and the Independent – are collected in As I Please and Other Writings 1986-2024.