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Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark and stormy, then certainly dark and wet) in the year 1850, and a baby has been left at the gates of Victoria Park. Then we have an uncanny detail: the baby is sniffed out by a pack of wolves, one of which bites off her little toe. Thankfully, a police constable finds her and walks through the night to Coram’s Fields to deliver her to the Foundling Hospital. From there she is sent to be fostered by a loving family on a farm in Suffolk for six years, only to return to the Hospital for a childhood of cruelty and abuse at the hands of the staff. We have already encountered her working as a wig-maker by day and dreaming at night of her execution by hanging.

It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of their traditional right-wing adversaries and the new Puritans on the left. In Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart sets out to explore their resulting confusion — but ends up inadvertently exemplifying it. Like his creator, the protagonist is a Russian Jew, born in Leningrad in 1972, who as a boy moved to America with his parents and later made his name writing satirical novels about people from the same background. Unlike Shteyngart, though, Sasha Senderovsky is now facing a stalled career, having abandoned literature in an ill-advised bid for success in TV screenplays.

Stuart England did not do its anti-Catholicism by halves. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a popular feature of London’s civic life were the annual Pope-burning pageants which took place every 17 November to commemorate the accession of Elizabeth I and the nation’s historic deliverance from the forces of international Catholicism. In 1679, one contemporary estimated that 200,000 people watched the spectacle, as a series of floats wound through London’s thronged streets bearing oversized effigies of Roman Catholic clergy, nuns, Jesuits and the Pope to be tipped into a bonfire at Temple Bar or Smithfield with lavish firework accompaniment.

As humans, we are supposed to have an aversion to slime. It should repel us. Objects and organisms that might be harmful trigger feelings of disgust which keep us away. And, according to the biologist Susanne Wedlich, the common denominator of ‘wide-ranging microbial threats, covering sickness, sex, death and putrefaction’ is their sliminess. It is easy to test this theory. Google ‘slime moulds’ and note your first response. They are gross. But these organisms are worth sticking with. Japanese researchers once conducted an experiment using a slime mould and a map of the country. They put the mould on top of Tokyo and dropped food on to the city’s surrounding towns.

Whatever your favourite theory of creativity, Paul McCartney has a cheery thumbs-up to offer. You think the secret is putting in the hours? ‘We played nearly 300 times in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962.’ Or could it be a wide range of cultural inputs to assimilate and remix? The Arty Beatle hoovered up Shakespeare, Dryden, not just Desmond but Thomas Dekker, Berio and Cage and rock’n’roll and light jazz, and sublimated them all. In one of the great missed opportunities, when it came to arranging ‘Yesterday’, his first thought was Delia Derbyshire. Some people credit childhood trauma: McCartney recalls how his father Jim would weep alone in a neighbouring room after Paul’s mother died. The sexual drive?

Those for whom Dave Eggers’s name evokes only his much praised memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may be surprised at just how much straight fiction he has written. ‘Those for whom’, here, is code for me. I confess it, the pros and cons of transparency being one of the themes of the book under review. In addition to McSweeney’s, his influential literary magazine, and other book-length nonfiction (his 2009 Hurricane Katrina book Zeitoun is exceptional), Eggers has published 13 lengthy novels. Here’s one of them: The Circle (2013), a blockbuster satire on the burgeoning power of internet companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google.