Something fundamental changed in our relationship with the moon when we realized we could touch it. With the moon landing of 1969, and earlier, with the first Soviet satellite impacting its surface in 1959, something mysterious was lost. Now that billionaires have the entire galaxy in their sights, even the wonder of those milestones feels quaint.

Serhiy Zhadan (pictured) is not your average soldier. He is a poet, novelist and rockstar, who is used to performing in front of crowds of thousands. Anyone who claims poetry is dead has not been to his readings: some 4,000 people at a time have attended them in Kyiv.

André​ Breton gave one of the best descriptions: ‘the rocket I’ll call Baya’. He also gave some of the worst: ‘a being as frail as she is talented’, ‘the child that is Baya’. Excitement vibrates around the subject of Alice Kaplan’s biography Seeing Baya.

When Deborah Cavendish,​ duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords.

It was late 1606 and Sir Henry Wotton – England’s ambassador in Venice – was in the middle of a crisis. For some months past, the Republic of Venice had been embroiled in a dispute with the Pope. At its heart was the question of who had the greatest authority.

It is strange to think that the artist who preserved so many of his contemporaries for posterity was buried anonymously. When Holbein fell victim to the plague in the autumn of 1543, the graveyard of his parish church in Aldgate was full.

If the modern reader finds it hard to pin down the man identified by his contemporary Alexander Pope as ‘restless Daniel’, it must be largely because Defoe was professionally as well as personally committed to maintaining a very low profile.

The Illuminating Women Artists series goes from strength to strength, with this volume on the Brussels-based 17th century painter, and another on the 18th-century French still-life artist Anne Vallayer-Coster, both arriving in April.

The thatched roof of the picturesque Dutch Reformed church in Franschhoek, South Africa, where we have been staying, was sprinkle-hosed the other Sunday. Wildfires have snaked across the mountains, and falling ash could spark.

The crusades bring up images of the ancient cities and harsh deserts of the Levant, of Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion and King Louis IX of France. The crusades to the Holy Land were a consuming obsession of Latin Christianity for four centuries and remain among the most famous episodes of the Middle Ages.