In early June 1363, Giovanni Boccaccio received a letter that stung him deeply. Just a few days shy of his fiftieth birthday, he was then at the height of his creative powers. He had already penned at least a dozen major works, including the Decameron, any one of which would have assured him a place alongside Dante and Petrarch in the firmament of Italian literature.

G. C. Waldrep’s poetry has always invited readers to “feast” on its byzantine density. That image, the “feast”, appears frequently in his collections (such as the fittingly titled feast gently, 2018); his latest book, The Opening Ritual, also offers an abundance of his characteristically detailed, conceptually vast stanzas.

“I have now found the law of the oak leaves” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal, after pages of worry about the tree’s “difficult” organisation. That difficulty is the result of a fascinating evolutionary inception, which Andrew L. Hipp, herbarium director at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, untangles brilliantly in his new book, Oak Origins: From acorns to species and the tree of life.

Almost all houses, says the architectural historian Owen Hopkins, reflect “received ideas” ingrained in architects, planning bodies, regulations and clients “about how houses are designed and built in particular places at particular moments in time”.

The Italian Renaissance was an age of nomads. Wandering painters, sculptors and workers in precious metals toted their technical skills from one city or court to another, perfectly ready to roll up a canvas, pack a painted panel or wrap a marble bust to be transported long distances down roads, rivers and canals. Everything, it might have seemed, was against them: regime change and warfare in the various duchies and city states, visitations of the plague, exorbitant demands of customs officials, floods, avalanches, brigandage and piracy.

In May 1945, the youth club of St Anne’s Church in Kew constructed a huge pile of dried wood on the nearby cricket green in preparation for the announcement of VE Day. When Churchill declared victory, the young people of the church paraded a full-size effigy of Adolf Hitler to the green and placed it on top of the pyre, whereupon the vicar, my predecessor, conducted a ceremonial burning, personally setting the whole thing alight.

In the early 20th century, the race to stake a claim to the future of art was as furious as the scramble for Africa a generation earlier. Its colonising pioneers came from all over Europe, guided by feverish dreams of glory. Picasso carved out a path to cubism and helped himself to indigenous cultures. A group of Italians, roped together by quasi-fascist ideology, penetrated deep into futurism.

Pub quiz masters with a taste for William Shakespeare are spoiled for choice when it comes to red letter years. The playwright’s birth and death, the building and burning down of the Globe, and the publication of the First Folio (1564, 1616, 1599, 1613, 1623) are all dates that sit dustily in the corners of many of our brains, ready to be summoned when trivia duty calls.

Few places​ celebrated the Restoration in 1660 with more enthusiasm than Sherborne in Dorset. It was late May, and crowds piled into the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor.

Our wall planner is pinned on to a large cork board in the kitchen. Structured month by month in rows, it is parma violet, coral pink and butter yellow, and huge – a good metre long, almost the size of the table beneath it.