This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.

In 1854 the fortunes of North Brookfield, Massachusetts were improving. A Congregational minister welcomed the fact, but worried that “not one dollar in fifty” in the shoe-manufacturing town “passes through our hands that is not probably derived” from “Southern slavery”.

The origins of the modern-day Spanish nation do not predate the existence of empire. In 1492 the Genovese adventurer Christopher Columbus set sail under the flags of the Catholic Monarchs – Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon – whose dynastic union and reconquest of Muslim territories laid the foundations for a unified country that, between 1580 and 1668, incorporated Portugal.

Drawing, as Susan Owens notes in this virtuosic study, is almost impossible to define. The word ‘can mean anything from the lightest sketch to the most complete, fully realised work of art’. The drawings Owens selects range from scratches on limestone, via charcoal, chalk and ink, to wire structures and splatters of bodily fluids.

Standing before the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 22 June 1972, the ecologist turned psychologist John Bumpass Calhoun, the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, appeared a mild-mannered, smallish man, sporting a greying goatee.

For those who sought their services, there were many professional female detectives in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, and not just in London – you could find them in Bristol, in Cardiff and in Glasgow, too. By January 1875 The Times was advertising, back-to-back, the services of the ‘Confidential Agency’ of Leslie and Graham in Holborn, assisted by ‘men of 20 years’ experience, and female detectives’, and Arthur Cleveland Montagu in Cornhill, which offered ‘a large staff of experienced detectives, male and female’.

I am an absolute sucker for a handsome reproduction of a rare and highly illustrated natural history, preferably more than two centuries old. This may possibly be a niche interest, but Catesby’s Natural History was pronounced a wonder when it was first published and is a wonder still.

The arrangement between an artist and a patron can be a delicate one, filigreed with implicit understandings and potential hazards. Patrons often provide financial help in return for the chance to varnish their prestige. Artists, in turn, can find themselves working within constraints set by a patron’s tastes, though they are ever eager to find room for some degree of creative freedom.

A few miles along the coast from Aberystwyth, where I am writing, are the petrified remains of a forest. They are all that is left of Gwyddno Garanhir’s lost kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, submerged beneath the sea in a single night’s cataclysm. That’s a myth, of course (though the petrified forest is real enough). Nevertheless, the story helps to highlight one of this highly topical book’s key themes: that many of the geographical features of the world around us that might seem immutable are not really so at all.

Barbara Comyns wrote strange, intoxicating novels that danced between genres, constantly upending our expectations. They’re the sort of books that stick around in your imagination long after you’ve finished them. But while her mid-century peers such as Elizabeth Jane Howard, Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Taylor are still widely read, or at least celebrated as “hidden gems”, Comyns’s work has been overlooked; some of her books are long out of print.