It is strange to think that the artist who preserved so many of his contemporaries for posterity was buried anonymously. When Holbein fell victim to the plague in the autumn of 1543, the graveyard of his parish church in Aldgate was full.

If the modern reader finds it hard to pin down the man identified by his contemporary Alexander Pope as ‘restless Daniel’, it must be largely because Defoe was professionally as well as personally committed to maintaining a very low profile.

The Illuminating Women Artists series goes from strength to strength, with this volume on the Brussels-based 17th century painter, and another on the 18th-century French still-life artist Anne Vallayer-Coster, both arriving in April.

The thatched roof of the picturesque Dutch Reformed church in Franschhoek, South Africa, where we have been staying, was sprinkle-hosed the other Sunday. Wildfires have snaked across the mountains, and falling ash could spark.

The crusades bring up images of the ancient cities and harsh deserts of the Levant, of Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion and King Louis IX of France. The crusades to the Holy Land were a consuming obsession of Latin Christianity for four centuries and remain among the most famous episodes of the Middle Ages.

A most unlikely proposition emerged this week in Davos. Larry Fink, interim co-head of the World Economic Forum, proposed moving the annual gathering of the world’s ultra-elite to Detroit or Dublin.

At the beating heart of the Mitford myth is the cell-like linen closet at the top of Asthall Manor, where Unity, Jessica and Deborah, the youngest of the six Mitford girls, idled away their childhoods.

No modern poet​ has had a career quite like Richard Siken’s. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention.

If Theodor Meron had arrived back at his cramped dwelling in the Jewish ghetto in southern Poland just a few minutes earlier in June 1943, he would have been executed along with his mother and maternal grandparents.

Melanie McDonagh, a distinguished journalist, explores why so many high-profile writers and artists became Roman Catholics in the 20th century. Her research shows that the majority of them were Catholic Anglicans who were dissatisfied with the contradictory positions held by their Church and who desired the greater clarity and certainty of Rome.