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Harper Lee’s writing career was brief, but her single novel became one of the most famous in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) won the Pulitzer Prize, sold tens of millions of copies and remains a fixture of classrooms and popular memory. She published almost nothing else until Go Set a Watchman – an earlier draft of Mockingbird – appeared in 2015, just before her death and perhaps without her meaningful consent. The Land of Sweet Forever gathers apprentice stories written before Mockingbird, along with a few later magazine pieces. Most are slight and the volume is more commercial than literary.

This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia? In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881).

Why another book about Maundy Gregory? The spiv who in the 1920s acted as middleman between David Lloyd George and potential peers, baronets and knights – the former desperate for money to fund his campaigns, the latter greedy for status, irrespective of any merit they might have – has been documented extensively. Gregory also features in histories of the period, in studies of the honours system and in countless newspaper and magazine articles. Stephen Bates’s book, which appears to have been published to mark the centenary of the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, adds little to what we already know. Despite other potential candidates, Gregory is the only person ever to have been prosecuted under that act.

On a damp Derbyshire day in 1771, Richard Arkwright watched the world’s first water-powered mill begin to turn, setting in motion a force that would remake the world. The tailor’s son from Preston had become one of Britain’s first industrialists, his spinning frames driven by water and his workers by hunger. Within those mill walls, as Edmond Smith argues in Ruthless, the modern economy took its first breath. Yet the real invention was not mechanical but social. Arkwright had helped pioneer the system that would propel Britain into the lead in the first Industrial Revolution – web of investors, miners, shippers and merchants, bound by credit, trust and the push for profit. In Smith’s phrase, it was ‘networked capital’, the invisible machine behind the visible one.