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

A mixed-race family living in an island paradise off the coast of Maine are made painfully aware that their days are numbered

Shinichi Suzuki certainly believed that learning music is like learning a language, and to be ‘fluent’ in an instrument merely depends on starting early enough

David Graeber imagines the 17th-century buccaneer establishing an enlightened kingdom in the Indian Ocean where all goods were held in common

The heartbroken father endlessly relives his son’s suicide, raking over every moment of Jack’s battle with depression and drug addiction

Criminal syndicates, corrupt officials and faceless assassins now control the increasingly depleted rainforest, killing or enslaving all who stand in their way