Stories of his famous grandfather’s war with the elements at the notorious Bell Rock enthralled Robert Louis Stevenson as a child. As a student at the Edinburgh Academy, and later the University, he was intended for the family business of lighthouse and harbour engineers.

Lynda Nead opens British Blonde with the cover of the Beatles album Sgt Pepper (1967). In the top left-hand corner of the collaged celebrities is the head of Mae West, from which you can draw a diagonal line that passes through the face of Marilyn Monroe, peeping out from the centre of the crowd, then comes to rest on the voluptuous full-length figure of Diana Dors, often known as “the British Marilyn”.

On a damp Derbyshire day in 1771, Richard Arkwright watched the world’s first water-powered mill begin to turn, setting in motion a force that would remake the world.

For most of us, the day-to-day experience of our water system is quite positive. At the twist of a tap, we are supplied with drinking water of the highest quality, while toilets dispatch waste that in centuries gone by caused disease and death.

Can there really be any point in yet another fat book about one of the Mitford sisters? Their antics have been appearing in print since the late 1940s, when the eldest – clever, waspish Nancy – displayed their family eccentricities in her sparkling novel The Pursuit of Love.

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch.

Nearly 30 years ago, dendrochronologists working on the roof of Salisbury Cathedral made a remarkable discovery. Not only did they find that some ancient beams were made of wood grown overseas; they also found that a few were incised with Arabic numerals.

Oceanic art has inspired a vast literature. Since the early 20th century, hundreds of catalogues and monographs have highlighted the collections of museums, explored genres and traditions and, more recently, celebrated contemporary practice. The achievement of Toi Te Mana (which roughly translates as ‘arts of power’) is of another order altogether.

In an episode​ of Seinfeld from 1996, Kramer and Newman hatch an ingenious moneymaking scheme. In New York, where they live, bottles and cans can be recycled for five cents each, but in Michigan the refund is ten cents.

The Forrest Gump of Asia? Not quite – but the life of Huang Chin-tao, as explored in Anna Beth Keim’s Heaven Does Not Block All Roads (Hurst), reflects many of the turning points in the modern history of one of the most controversial places on the continent: Taiwan.