Pic­ture the scene – you’re cross-coun­try ski­ing across an icy snowscape: just you, the frozen sea and a ‘group of tobog­gan­ing Ade­lie pen­guins’. As you pass, they waddle over, curi­ous to see what you are doing. Decid­ing that you’re prob­ably all right, they con­tinue tobog­gan­ing on their bel­lies along­side you as you ski back to your camp.

During the occult revival of the nineteenth century, hundreds of palm-readers promised thousands of clients insights into their personalities and futures.

Nick Lloyd, who runs tours on the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in Barcelona, confesses that new volumes on the war are ubiquitous, and that it features in the Spanish press every day. Writing a genuinely engrossing book on the subject, as he has, is therefore no mean feat.

On the morning of October 30, 1961, scientists at Kew Observatory in southwest London detected an unusual air pressure wave. Its spokesman told The Times that it was “the largest such recording I have ever known”.

Side by side these two books appear counter-intuitive. The defender of legalised assisted dying is a well-known Jewish rabbi, whereas its strident adversary is a secular philosopher.

One of the most common assumptions within the social science is that the more that societies grow, develop and industrialise the less religious and the more secular they will be. And in the initial decades of, say, the western industrialised nations there was a fair amount of evidence to support this as an overall thesis.

Murky Water is a meticulously researched analysis of the state of the water industry in England and Wales, and outlines possible ways forward.

Bishops come and go, “like snow upon the desert’s dusty face”, leaving little behind. Dunstans, Beckets, Cranmers, and Lauds are few and far between. This is also true of the later Middle Ages, when few but historians can think of a name, apart from the founders of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war.  Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text.

Being underestimated​ was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. Her earliest talent was for invisibility. To the men who surrounded her father, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was a gloomy, awkward girl.