‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because’, said the American writer Josephine Herbst – just one of the sisterhood to become immersed in the struggle

Single volumes that fitted in a knapsack sustained many soldiers in the world wars, and have inspired countless schoolchildren to learn poems by heart

Bernard Wasserstein describes the dreadful fate of Jews in Krakowiec in the 1940s – and is astonished that a statue has been erected there to one of their chief persecutors

The lifespans of cedars, oaks and yews are remarkable enough, but they pale in comparison to America’s bristlecone pines

Chaucer’s motley crew help to encapsulate the richness and diversity of the late-medieval world and its growing literacy, says Ian Mortimer

Two respected family men are each burdened by an unacceptable private life, in a debut novel based on the experiences of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis

A young guerrilla gardener and an American billionaire vie for a plot of land in New Zealand. Can they trust one another to reach an agreement?

Leah Broad celebrates four pioneering musicians who battled male prejudice throughout the past century – yet the situation remains stubbornly unchanged

Trapped abroad during lockdown, a lackadaisical reviewer is spurred to investigate the mysterious noises coming from the floor above his hotel suite

In a powerful and ultimately heartening memoir, the Oxford professor describes being trapped in a mutinous body, and what it does to the spirit

The novelist and travel writer reflects on the resilience of the human spirit in countries whose staggering beauty has largely been trashed

It was a year packed with drama – from the transatlantic crossing of the SS Great Britain to the start of the Irish potato blight that would leave millions starving

The biographer and journalist was always reluctant to write about herself, and this posthumously published memoir is hemmed in by what she kept locked away

The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces

Exploring stretches of the country’s Roman road, Tom Bullough notes how climate change and environmental degradation are seriously threatening the landscape

Even the serious abuse she suffered as a small child and a teenager is described without a trace of self-pity

When a rich farmer goes missing and his young wife seeks the protection of an impoverished labourer, the consequences are disastrous

A surgeon from Kashmir is tormented by the penal operations he once performed under Sharia law, such as amputations for robbery

Any mention of imperialism’s benefits is now considered morally reprehensible, as the furore over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism shows

The vast majority of musicians who adopted 1960s rock and roll were later reviled by the Khmer Rouge and consigned to the Killing Fields, says Dee Payok

Sam Miller challenges the ‘myth of sedentarism’, arguing that mankind is naturally nomadic and that an itinerant life is anyway good for us

Characters ruminate, doors are shut and relationships falter as one person’s thoughts grate on another’s in these subtle, tightly-knit stories

Leaving poetry aside, his memoir covers insanity, debt, drugs, narcissism, religious mania and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored

The Mesta region of Bulgaria, where the river meets the forests of the western Rhodope range, remains remarkably intact and rich in wild harvests

There are many vagaries about measurements, says Claire Cock-Starkey: the length of the foot has often changed, but British shoe sizes hark back to the reign of Edward II