The arrangement between an artist and a patron can be a delicate one, filigreed with implicit understandings and potential hazards. Patrons often provide financial help in return for the chance to varnish their prestige. Artists, in turn, can find themselves working within constraints set by a patron’s tastes, though they are ever eager to find room for some degree of creative freedom.

A few miles along the coast from Aberystwyth, where I am writing, are the petrified remains of a forest. They are all that is left of Gwyddno Garanhir’s lost kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, submerged beneath the sea in a single night’s cataclysm. That’s a myth, of course (though the petrified forest is real enough). Nevertheless, the story helps to highlight one of this highly topical book’s key themes: that many of the geographical features of the world around us that might seem immutable are not really so at all.

Barbara Comyns wrote strange, intoxicating novels that danced between genres, constantly upending our expectations. They’re the sort of books that stick around in your imagination long after you’ve finished them. But while her mid-century peers such as Elizabeth Jane Howard, Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Taylor are still widely read, or at least celebrated as “hidden gems”, Comyns’s work has been overlooked; some of her books are long out of print.

With Remembrance Day coming, arguments about whether poppies should be worn are in full flow. Yet there is one issue that never seems to be heard in the annual debate that now marks this solemn occasion: while Britain fought the second world war to defeat Nazi Germany, putting its own existence as a free country at stake, it denied freedom to its colonies.

In the morning of February 9, 1942, the body of Evelyn Hamilton was discovered partly clothed in a bomb shelter on Montagu Place, Marylebone. She was forty-one, unmarried, a confirmed socialist and a graduate of Newcastle University. She had arrived at her digs on nearby Gloucester Place at 10.30 the night before and had plans to catch a train the next morning.

The power of central banks has grown significantly in the last fifteen years, but the capacity of democracies to keep them under control has not. It’s time we rethink the consensus on their independence, which requires central banks to strictly adhere to their declared goals, independently from state influence. This was acceptable when central banking was relatively simple: declaring inflation corridors, conduct monetary operations and supervising banks. 

In 1922 Winston Churchill bought a country home in Kent, an hour outside London. Chartwell was a bit of an architectural hotchpotch, but to Churchill it represented a place to retreat to and lick his wounds.

In September 2004, Pauline Terreehorst, then director of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, spotted a vintage Gucci suitcase coming up for auction as part of a job lot. Having long coveted such an elegant piece of luggage, she put in what turned out to be the winning bid. The suitcase came with, in her words, ‘a whole cabinet of curiosities’: dresses, buttons, lace, a fur stole and riding jackets.

Building a state takes decades of hard labour. Destroying one can be done virtually overnight. In September 2018, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to sign a tripartite pact with Isaias Afwerki and Mohamed Abdullahi (known as ‘Farmaajo’), presidents of Eritrea and Somalia respectively.

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making books in the Middle Ages is a highly readable account of developments in book production in western Europe during the Middle Ages, surveying and contextualizing many of its best-known and most significant treasures while casting interesting light on the circumstances of their production.