Thomas Arundel was archbishop of Canterbury from 1396 until his death in 1414, and five times lord chancellor of England. He was the archetypal political bishop. He was the youngest son of the tenth earl of Arundel, one of the richest and most powerful men in England.

Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than nearly any other living Chinese author.

In the mid-twentieth century, geneticist Lionel Penrose observed correlations between genetic abnormalities and the creases of the hand, publishing his final paper ‘Fingerprints and palmistry’ in The Lancet in 1973. The hand has long intrigued physicians, embryologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists and physical anthropologists, notes historian Alison Bashford.

In November 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics. In the course of this visit she asked the assembled economists why they had not seen the financial crisis coming. Not having any immediate answers, the economists consulted and ran seminars.

“Climate defies easy definition,” writes historian Melissa Charenko in her complex yet accessible book on the scientific study of the climate during the twentieth century. This research relied on climate proxies, which fall into two types. Physical proxies include fossilized pollen, tree rings and stalagmites.

One of the many vivid details in geographer Jamie Woodward’s brief history of Earth is palaeontologist Stephen Gould’s demonstration of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year lifespan during his lectures. Using his outstretched arm, Gould’s shoulder marks Earth’s formation, life appears at the elbow and the last millimetre of his middle fingernail represents the history of humans.

The sight of two young male friends walking across Cornwall in the summer of 1850 with knapsacks on their backs caused consternation among the locals.

‘Poor fellows!’ they said. ‘Obliged to carry all your baggage on your own backs!’ In villages, little children ran indoors to bring out their siblings.

In 1964, two physicists working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey were puzzling over the persistent static that plagued the signals picked up by a massive receiver built to detect radio waves bouncing off satellites.

Nobody likes a convert. For believers, the word carries connotations of zealotry, an implicit accusation of slackness in those with established beliefs. To the unconverted, it represents a baffling abandonment, a loss of plot and implied disapproval of unconverted friends.

Constructed to be a statement of French military strength, the Maginot Line has come to be seen instead as solid evidence of a defensive, doomed-to-defeat attitude, duly exploited by the Blitzkrieg in the summer of 1940.