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When Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans published his novel À rebours in 1884, he was still a part-time author. By day, the thirty-six-year-old Parisian was a civil servant. At night he wrote, visited his long-suffering lover and attended salons with Émile Zola, his literary mentor.

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming historian Christopher Hill.

When I was studying for my A-Level History exams, I sometimes used to pop into Foyle’s bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road to browse the voluminous History shelves, and on one of my visits I came across The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill, published in 1961.

The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism.

A ruthless ruler and opponent, devoted wife and mother to sixteen children, Maria Theresa’s forty year rule over her European territories is nothing if not miraculous.

It didn’t take long for preliminary discussions between the US and Russia on Ukraine to morph into something dramatically more ambitious. As negotiators left talks in Riyadh this week, both sides signalled their intent to reach agreement not only Ukraine, but also on economic and geopolitical cooperation.

Why did a stranger “stand up to evil” to save her? The Holocaust survivor Huguette Müller began pondering that question in the winter of 1943 as a 15-year-old German-Jewish refugee in Nazi-occupied France. While she and her sister, Marion, were attempting to flee, Huguette slipped on the ice and injured her leg so severely that the girls were forced to stay in the small Alpine village of Val d’Isère.

What happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?” Jonathan Rauch asks in the opening pages of Cross Purposes. “The alarming answer is that the crisis for Christianity has turned out to be a crisis for democracy.”

The practice of hunting with birds has existed in Eurasia for at least 4,000 years. Probably originating in the East, it spread westwards, reaching its apogee in western Europe during the Middle Ages.

Nicholas Nicastro – academic, novelist and film critic – offers a lively biography of Archimedes, the third-century BCE inventor and mathematician from Sicily. Reliable evidence for his life is sparse, and this has helped, as Nicastro shows, to promote his legend.