We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is.

When the regime of Bashar al-Assad started to topple in November 2024, news travelled fast throughout the Syrian diaspora. Activists and analysts organised eleventh-hour meetings. Some wanted to watch developments on social media. Others wanted to talk about all that had been lost in the almost fourteen years of civil war that had raged since 2011.

Originally published in 1886 and reprinted with an introduction by fiction fan Kirsty Logan, these deliciously dark tales have the hallmarks of classic ghost stories.

When Katarína Kucbelová’s fifth poetry collection, k bielej (whitewards), was published in 2022, Slovakia was reeling from one of the world’s worst per capita Covid death rates, fractured by conspiracy theories and shaken by political turmoil sparked by the war in neighbouring Ukraine.

There can be few architectural history books that have come to a more extraordinary conclusion than Islamesque. Its author, Diana Darke, argues that Europe’s Romanesque churches were built not by local masons, but by Arab craftsmen brought from North Africa and the Middle East.

One of the women in this pairing is world-famous, but the other proves more interesting, in this book published to accompany an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Minneapolis in 1891, Mary Reynolds moved to Paris in 1921, after her husband’s death in France shortly after the First World War.

On a visit to Cairo in 1047, the Persian scholar Nasir-i Khusraw attended a feast at the court of al-Mustansir, the eighth Fatimid caliph and ruler of Egypt (1036–94). Nasir later recounted that the royal hall had been decorated with thousands of confectionery sculptures, including an ornamental orange tree with branches and leaves crafted entirely from sugar.

Thirty years after William Wordsworth died, the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley walked around Grasmere chatting to the locals and seeking memories of the great poet. To Rawnsley, a late 19th-century man of letters, this must have seemed a rich seam to hack into because Wordsworth had by then been lionised as a giant of English poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson is chiefly remembered for the creation of the archetypal Jekyll and Hyde (1886), so strangely or perhaps not so strangely foreshadowing the crimes of Jack the Ripper, and for his tales of boyhood adventure – Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893).

One word appeared in almost every headline about the tragic story of Constance Marten’s baby, and it was not “manslaughter”. Marten was, in the eyes of journalists, an “aristocrat”, and had she not been brought up in a large country house, on an estate that had belonged to her family since the sixteenth century, her trial would never have provoked such frenzied interest.