Jonathan Kennedy explores the (mainly) devastating effects of bacteria in the past – and now, as they proliferate and our resistance diminishes

There are vignettes of many Cambridge contemporaries – including the mysterious John Sackur, the inspiration for the invisible man in Donkeys’ Years

He dismisses the philosophy of religion as sixth-formish point-scoring. But are his own ruminations any more profound?

Edward VII’s reign is generally seen as a bright interlude between Victorian primness and the Great War – but there was considerable unrest on many fronts

After the Amboyna massacre of 1623, the newly-fledged East India Company conceded the spice trade to the Dutch – to focus instead on the riches of India

A counterfactual history of modern America serves as a backdrop to the life of the enigmatic ‘X’ – a woman of multiple personae and impenetrable disguises

In the wake of their father’s death, a brother and sister recall the violent domestic dramas of their childhood

A merciless ETA terrorist is in hiding in Spain – but which of three seemingly innocent women is she?

Timothy Garton Ash weighs the consequences of the push towards a single currency, the West’s dependence for energy on Russia, and Brexit, among much else

Under the much-vaunted new secularism, Muslims were treated as second-class citizens at best - and were often the victims of mass pogroms

The buzz of modernity has plagued us since the Industrial Revolution – but even Thoreau tired of practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond

Death permeates these stories, as Nell – a stand-in for Atwood – mourns the loss of her beloved partner Tig

A complex novel explores the ways we try to understand a world that isn’t good or fair or causal or even comprehensible

If opera is acting, concealing the self behind a character, where does that leave the singer in the concert hall, caught between ventriloquist and dummy, wonders Ian Bostridge

From the mass panic of William the Conqueror’s to the drunken mayhem of Victoria’s, few coronations have passed off entirely peacefully

Traditional fairy tales are transposed to a modern setting and given a thrilling – often terrifying – twist