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.

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

In Small Earthquakes journalist and travel writer Shafik Meghji traverses landscapes from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego and Easter Island to South Georgia to reveal the overlooked yet profound – and profoundly enduring – connections between Britain and Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

Kazakh, Tatar, Russian, Uyghur, Polish, German, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Chechen, Korean, Armenian – this far from exhaustive list gives an inkling of the ethnic complexity created by Kazakhstan’s history of pastoral nomadism, Russian imperial conquest and colonization, followed by famine, forced sedentarization, mass deportations and Gulag incarceration.

In 1983, along with thousands of other women, I cut down sections of the fence around RAF Greenham Common, which was to house nuclear weapons in the form of cruise missiles.

Horace lived in turbulent times. He was born in 65 BC and died in 8 BC, a period that saw Rome’s frightening transition from republic to empire. As Peter Stothard makes clear in this wonderful biography of the poet, this was a time of assassinations, suicides, civil war and confiscations.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts.