Five hundred years ago, in February 1526, some six thousand copies of William Tyndale’s complete New Testament of the Bible were printed at a press in the imperial city of Worms in Germany. Today, as we celebrate the quincentennial, there are only two copies known to have survived the banning and burning of his work in England.

In August 1931 Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, faced the greatest calamity of his political career. He survived it – and remained in 10 Downing Street for nearly four more years – but at a heavy cost.

Kathleen Harriman’s letters are particularly revealing on account of their omissions and misapprehensions. The youngest daughter of millionaire tycoon Averell Harriman, she was well schooled in diplomacy, accompanying him to London, where he served as Roosevelt’s special envoy, and to Moscow when he became US ambassador to Russia.

Thomas Arundel was archbishop of Canterbury from 1396 until his death in 1414, and five times lord chancellor of England. He was the archetypal political bishop. He was the youngest son of the tenth earl of Arundel, one of the richest and most powerful men in England.

Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than nearly any other living Chinese author.

In the mid-twentieth century, geneticist Lionel Penrose observed correlations between genetic abnormalities and the creases of the hand, publishing his final paper ‘Fingerprints and palmistry’ in The Lancet in 1973. The hand has long intrigued physicians, embryologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists and physical anthropologists, notes historian Alison Bashford.

In November 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics. In the course of this visit she asked the assembled economists why they had not seen the financial crisis coming. Not having any immediate answers, the economists consulted and ran seminars.

“Climate defies easy definition,” writes historian Melissa Charenko in her complex yet accessible book on the scientific study of the climate during the twentieth century. This research relied on climate proxies, which fall into two types. Physical proxies include fossilized pollen, tree rings and stalagmites.

One of the many vivid details in geographer Jamie Woodward’s brief history of Earth is palaeontologist Stephen Gould’s demonstration of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year lifespan during his lectures. Using his outstretched arm, Gould’s shoulder marks Earth’s formation, life appears at the elbow and the last millimetre of his middle fingernail represents the history of humans.

The sight of two young male friends walking across Cornwall in the summer of 1850 with knapsacks on their backs caused consternation among the locals.

‘Poor fellows!’ they said. ‘Obliged to carry all your baggage on your own backs!’ In villages, little children ran indoors to bring out their siblings.