In 1924, on a rainy December day in Rome, a small crowd of doctors and journalists led by a bearded man in robes filed out of a theatre and gathered around a pit. The robed man stuffed cotton into his nose and ears, then climbed into the hole, where he was covered with soil.

It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’.

It is surprisingly difficult to discuss Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) without mentioning John Constable (1776-1837), or vice versa. This is an inevitable consequence of the extraordinary coincidence that two of Great Britain’s most stellar national treasures not only worked in the same field of pioneering landscape painting but were also born just 14 months apart.

One​ way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy.

In 1916, Vanessa Bell moved to Sussex with her lover Duncan Grant, his lover David Garnett and the two sons she had by her husband, Clive, who paid visits to the unconventional ménage with his latest flame, Mary, in tow.

During the second half of the 20th century the favoured metaphor for the effortless and detached exercise of power was ‘the push of a button’. It linked everyone from ordinary citizens through to the leaders of nations, for whom this same gesture could activate anything from an ice maker to nuclear war.

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work.

At the end of Something Speaks to Me, Michel Chaouli exhorts the reader to carry on the work of “poetic criticism” that his book has been advocating. Now, he says, it’s “Your turn”.

In a world where many currencies circulate, one of them invariably comes out on top. Great prestige accrues to the country that issues the dominant currency. The issuer enjoys other advantages besides, such as the ability to borrow at lower interest rates, and weaker constraints on how much it can borrow.

This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here.