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In his history of the Pacific War, Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald Spector described the state of the US army on the eve of the second world war: ‘The main enemies were boredom and debt. The answer to such problems was often liquor.’ When the officer corps was not boozing, it was sufficiently obsessed with athletics to derail training, for ‘success at football and boxing could be as important to a man’s career as success in manoeuvres’. Its weapons were decrepit and its ranks ragged. George Marshall, the future chief of staff, commanded a notional battalion that numbered fewer than 200 men. That portrait of antebellum decay came to mind when reading The Changing of the Guard, a scathing account of the British army in the years after 9/11.

The gnostic Gospel of Mary has long been the subject of controversy, even as to which of the several Marys who feature in Jesus’s life was its author. It is generally assumed to have been Mary Magdalene, not least because it depicts her regular adversary, St Peter, refusing to credit a woman’s testimony. In Names of the Women, Jeet Thayil challenges Peter, along with 2,000 years of church tradition, by placing Mary Magdalene and 14 other women at the very heart of the gospel story. His intention to retell pivotal incidents from a female perspective is evident from the opening words ‘Mary, write,’ which are repeated in various forms throughout the book. The women’s stories are related in short, discrete chapters and clear, almost clinical prose.

Sylvie Bermann was the French ambassador in London between 2014 and 2017. Her stint here was a notable success. She is a highly intelligent, articulate woman, excellent company, an astute observer of the British scene and a notable anglophile, who generated much goodwill for herself and her country. She has taken the opportunity of her retirement from the French diplomatic service to write a highly undiplomatic account of her time in London which will lose her a fair amount of that goodwill. Goodbye Britannia is a witty, waspish and angry account of the Brexit referendum and the political crisis which followed it. It is agreeably rude about British politicians, especially the current Prime Minister, whom she describes as a lying mountebank.

Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to a full-grown cow. As she sat cross-legged, strumming away not very well on a guitar, the cow lay down beside her and gently nudged her with its huge head as adoringly as any puppy. The sight brought to mind a passage in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in which he reflects on music as a remedy: Harts, hinds, horses, dogs, bears are exceedingly delighted with it; elephants, Agrippa adds; and in Lydia in the midst of a lake there be certain floating islands (if ye will believe it), that after music will dance.

Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of modern British art. Among his contemporaries are Edward Bawden, Richard Eurich, John Piper, Eric Ravilious and Graham Sutherland. Some of these have been over-praised (Sutherland’s reputation was unhelpfully inflated for many years, then suffered a crash), others underrated, such as Eurich. In the current mood of reassessment, careers and deeds are being looked at again, and Hennell has benefited accordingly. Jessica Kilburn’s hefty book is very tangible evidence of this.

In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels, plus a couple of early efforts under his birth name, G.E. Armitage. I must have read two thirds of this shelf-distending oeuvre, but in none of them have I ever detected the faintest whiff of disguised autobiography. Whether writing about early-Victorian Lakeland, in the 2006 Booker-longlisted Casting the Waters, or reanimating the career of P.T. Barnum (In the Days of the American Museum, 1990), Edric has always worn his detachment, his absolute reluctance to say anything about the person he is, or was, like a rosette. All this makes My Own Worst Enemy, an account of his immensely tough upbringing in the shadow of the Sheffield steel factories, rather a departure.