If you want to be a Southern lady and reach the summit of flowery femininity and thoughtful, gracious manners, there are a few things to master: how to bestow a sharp-edged compliment and when not to wear pearls. But above all never be seen chewing gum, because that’s just cheap.

As Robert Caro tells us in what may be the greatest political biography of modern times, President Lyndon Johnson marshalled incredible resources, including a willingness to lie, cheat and steal at the highest level, in the service of an ambitious and noble programme of reform.

In 1792 Tom Paine wrote that whatever shape summer might take it was ‘not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun’. If the French Revolution did not fulfil the radicals’ hopes, these early years left an enduring legacy to Wordsworth, making him the great poet of feeling and hope.

Ian McEwan’s novels tend to set up a clash between opposing worldviews, with the authorial thumb pressed heavily on one side of the scales. His latest, a humanist exploration of posthumanist ideas, is a hugely pleasurable read, but might the author not have tried to surprise us a little more?

Whereas Homer, and the Homeric heroes, would have regarded manual labour as a noble pursuit, Plato saw ‘mechanical crafts’ and the raising of ‘sordid beasts’ (farming) as activities suitable only to the lowest ranks, distracting man from the encounter with his soul.

Sarah Henstra’s novel about rape culture in the fraternity of an American Ivy League college can at times be a messy, difficult and violent read, but ultimately it is an important book, one that demands to be read and is not easily forgotten.

In Ann Quin’s fictional world acts of finality or resolution repeatedly come undone. A dead bird is buried and then dug up. Plans of escape are formulated and then abandoned. A corpse is disposed of and returns. Tissues of falsehood are constructed and destroyed. Business is always left unfinished.

Daniel Defoe was a prolific journalist, producing no fewer than 560 journals, tracts and books yet somehow always in debt. His various schemes included attempts to sell marine insurance and to breed civet cats – and the writing of what we might consider the first novel in English.

By the 1990s, seven prose works by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó had appeared in French, ten in Czech and seventeen in German, while there are now more translations in Italian even than in English. How does this neglect impinge on our notions of the universality of literature?

It seems appropriate that Simone Weil was buried between a cemetery’s Jewish and Catholic sections. Ultimately, belonging in any sense provoked in her an allergic reaction. She was Christian but not wholly Catholic, and perhaps also, as a Platonist, Catholic but not wholly Christian.