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It took six years, starting in the summer of 1784, for the Board of Ordnance to establish the baseline of its triangulation of Great Britain. First they used wooden poles, then glass tubes. After much clearing of furze bushes and anthills, the baseline ran for more than five miles from Hounslow Heath to Hampton Poor House. The maps of England and Wales were complete by 1870. Scotland had to wait until 1887. The delay was rumored to have been caused by the superintendent’s concern that surveyors would get in the way of the late summer deerstalking. As a wing of the military, the Ordnance Survey had extraordinary powers. The Surveyors’ Act of 1841 allowed it to trudge, clamber, squelch, measure and interrogate wherever necessary.

The elegant, charismatic and narcissistic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wasn’t the average adventurer that Alaska attracted in 1912. When he arrived in Seattle from the Gold Rush port of Nome, he told journalists that he had discovered “a lost tribe of whites” in the uncharted High Arctic. He also sold politicians the vision of an undiscovered land rich in gold, raw metals and oil that, only nine years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, would soon be covered with airfields. The Canadian government quickly offered Stefansson unlimited resources to lead an expedition back to the High Arctic. His objective was to claim what may have been the greatest geopolitical prize for Canada and the British Empire: the mysterious continent at the top of the world.

Almost two decades ago, Jared Diamond cemented his international reputation with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which argued that geography and environment rather than racial differences shaped the rise and conquest of nations. Still going strong at 89, he has now written a book on leadership. This is a crowded literary space, but Diamond offers a distinctive approach. A distinguished biologist and polymath, he has little time for the Great Man theory of history popularized by the 19th-century essayist Thomas Carlyle. Altogether too subjective, he says, never mind the absence of women. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is no better a guide, since it casts individuals as constrained by circumstance, with scant influence over events.

The twin themes of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel are truth and fame. In fact it’s not quite accurate to call it a “novel”: there are two main characters, but there is no plot; and although you start to understand each woman, it’s through observation of their behavior in a series of vignettes rather than a conventional story. The titular “M” is an actress of beauty and renown, reportedly based on Natalie Portman. Her friend, the unnamed narrator, wants to write her biography. “Would you just make it up?” M suggests airily, giving us a notion of how fabrication is sewn into her life.

“The nonsense was over at last,” wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czesław Miłosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of World War Two. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of “local” warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.