One Saturday eleven years ago, I put on an ill-fitting suit and caught a train to Gatwick Airport. I headed to an airport hotel, where a “coloured diamonds” investments firm was recruiting a new crop of salespeople. I was set a series of bizarre tasks, each of which was followed by several candidates – addressed not by name, but by number – being unceremoniously sent home.

One of the first social rules children learn is the painful necessity of sharing. After the shock of encountering other wants and needs as strong as their own, a child who hands over stickers and sweets to their peers is praised. Yet for adults in the UK, sharing and caring, a glib rhyme that packages an important truth, is no longer a priority.

The penalty kick was first proposed to the Football Association as a drastic sanction against dangerous conduct in 1891. Tabled by an amateur goalkeeper from Armagh, it was rejected as an affront to the nobility of the game. How, in a sport played by gentlemen, could there be any foul play? It was, they said, an insult to assume that “players intend to behave like cads”.

Leo Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer in the defence of the great Russian naval base of Sevastopol against British and French invaders in the middle of the 19th century. The first of his three short stories, collected as Sevastopol Sketches, came out as the siege was still in progress.

Danny Dorling’s new book is a stark analysis of poverty and low incomes in Britain today. The author rightly focuses on families with children and pictures the lives of seven children spanning the range of household incomes.

Recently published in paperback, this entertaining, thoughtful and detailed analysis of British comics from the late Victorian period to the present day is not to be missed. Written with insight and passion, if you don’t see yourself as interested in comic books then this might well be the text to get you started.

For such small fish, anchovies pack a big punch. They can be eaten on their own or as part of almost any dish, from pasta sauces to vinaigrettes. Yet for every person who loves them there will be another for whom they provoke the deepest revulsion.

Scholars have long suggested that Christopher Marlowe had a collaborator for the comic scenes of his classic play Doctor Faustus, although his name alone is on the 1604 published edition. Now a largely forgotten dramatist, Henry Porter, has emerged as the likely co-author, based on comparative linguistic evidence that has been unearthed from his surviving play.

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers?

Some of the “searchers” were skilled at inspecting the clothes, hair and genitals of Victorian women and finding stolen money and pawn tickets for stolen goods. Others undertook risky sting operations, catching thieves and criminals red-handed and successfully testifying against them in court.