When the BBC was founded in 1922 it was not completely clear what it was for. ‘If there is any news’, explained an early edition of the Radio Times helpfully, ‘it will be broadcast at 9pm’.

At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”.

There is much to unpick from the title alone of My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. The reference to Africa as a country describes the pan-Africanist philosophy of Andree Blouin, a mixed heritage woman born in the Central African Republic. It is important to understand that Blouin’s support for pan-Africanism — as she appears to interpret it, as a United States of Africa — does not mean she was a socialist. She was not.

This volume covers 800 years of Māori art, exploring a range of art practices including raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattooing), and whakairo (carving). The volume, written by a trio of Māori art historians, took 12 years to complete and focuses on “exploring the idea of Indigenous art histories that value Indigenous voices, perspective and objectives, making art history more relevant and less Eurocentric”, the authors say.

When Primo Levi, the Turin-born chemist and nuanced chronicler of the human condition, pondered quite how he had survived Auschwitz, he gave the credit to a gruff bricklayer called Lorenzo Perrone: “not so much for his material aid”, he wrote, “as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror… for which it was worth surviving”.

Norwegians​ make a fuss about first books. The newspapers publish round-ups of the year’s literary debutants, who are invited to writers’ workshops organised specially for them. In 1983, two young authors met at one such workshop in Sweden.

Around​ fifteen years ago, a new term entered the climate change lexicon: stranded assets. The concept was straightforward enough. If global warming is to be kept from getting out of hand, there is a limit to the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted into the atmosphere.

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.

Most Americans gained their impression of London during the Blitz from the radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow on CBS. Murrow lionized the resilience and decency of ordinary Londoners and their heroic resistance to the Nazi threat, and his reports were a vital means of connecting the still neutral U.S. to the perils of the war in Europe.

Early in Shakespeare in Love, as Will is hurrying through London to his psychiatrist, he hears a Puritan preacher “haranguing anyone who will listen to him”, as Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay puts it. The preacher inveighs against the Curtain theatre before turning to the other playhouse: “And the Rose smells thusly rank by any name! I say a plague on both their houses!”. The screenplay adds a direction: “As he passes WILL gratefully makes a mental note”.