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Jeremy Corbyn will probably enjoy this book — which doesn’t mean you won’t. Asked to name the historical figure he most admired when first standing for the Labour leadership, Corbyn answered that in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne.Very interesting character, because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different. Lilburne, who should certainly be better known, was a leader of a group that came to be called the Levellers, which flourished at the height of England’s civil strife in the 1640s, and whose radical, democratising politics has sporadically appeared on the agenda of the left, invoked as the ‘Good Old Cause’, ever since.

A few years ago, I fell hopelessly in love with Harriet Walter. It only lasted an hour or two: she was playing Brutus in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of Julius Caesar, and there she was, aloof, damaged, burning with pride and suppressed sorrow. The Donmar theatre’s production was set in a women’s prison, as if performed by inmates. In Walter’s mind, we learn in her latest book, she was not playing white, older, educated Brutus, but ‘Hannah’, a long-term prisoner whose presence in the jail she based on the story of Judith Clark, an anti-capitalist revolutionary imprisoned for driving the getaway car at a fatal bank robbery.

All biography is both an act of homage and a labour of dissection, and all biographers are jealous of their subjects. Most keep it cool, but some like it hot and have created a distinct category in which jealousy becomes murder followed by necromancy: the one they hug is asphyxiated — but lo! — they breathe their own air back into it. Sartre’s book on Jean Genet is such a work, as are Brigid Brophy’s on Ronald Firbank and Roger Lewis’s on Anthony Burgess. Claude Arnaud’s on Jean Cocteau is yet another. Its approach is intensely romantic. Everyone is heaving in lurid colours.

When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had terrorised people for decades across a big chunk of Africa turned out to be emaciated teenagers with dirty clothes who could hardly hold the big guns they carried. Some were unarmed children, barely ten years old. He felt sorry for them. ‘They could not have known anything else but living in the forest like wild animals.’ Soon he had joined their pack, a reluctant member of one of the world’s most notorious rebel groups. A bright boy who dreamed of becoming a teacher, George ended up a bodyguard to one of the world’s most bloodstained killers.

Did you know that 190 out of 200 nations in the world have either red or blue on their flags? (The wheel in the middle of India’s flag is blue, for example, and the Vatican flag has a red cord hanging from the keys.) Did you know that four of those 190 — Andorra, Chad, Moldova and Romania — have pretty much the same blue-yellow-red tricolour? Or that the stripes of the French flag are not of even width, but are proportioned 30-34-37? It’s an optical illusion: if the red, white and blue are of equal breadth, the flag looks curiously unbalanced. These are among the facts that you won’t find in Tim Marshall’s Worth Dying For, a vexillological miscellany. I bring them up in no carping spirit.

There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s foremost female authors, philosophers and eccentrics. But there have been several near misses. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando tips its cap to her: Orlando, just like Cavendish, is a feverishly imaginative, androgynous aristocrat afflicted by the ‘honourable disease’ of writing, filling folios with the speed of an addict. Writers from Pepys to Lamb have tended her flame, as have two recent biographies. Siri Hustvedt paid extensive homage to Cavendish in her 2014 novel set in New York’s art scene, The Blazing World — a title, devotees of the Duchess will notice, appropriated from Cavendish’s fantasy novella of 1666.

In these books, two handsome and popular telly adventurers consider, from viewpoints that are sometimes overly autobiographical, the culture of internal combustion in two of its most distinctive forms. Ben Fogle is obsessed by Land Rovers while Richard Hammond is fascinated by motorbikes. Fogle came to notice in 2000 when he survived a harrowing year in front of the cameras on Taransay for the reality show Castaway. Here he says he found a rusting Series II Land Rover. This is odd because their bodies are made of aluminium, which corrodes in a different way. Hammond, the cute pixie of the Top Gear trio, made his own career move when, again in front of cameras, he crashed a dragster in 2006. Bravado in its different forms is a part of each account.

Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto: Semper in ventrem aliquid novi). Dedicated to the memory and gastronomic exploits of Francis Trevelyan (Frank) Buckland (1826–1880), the Oxford-born surgeon, natural historian and popular writer who aspired to eat a member of every living animal species, the Club’s repasts are unfailingly interesting, if seldom so ambitious. Frank’s penchant for zoöphagy came from his father, William (1784–1856), a Canon and Dean of Christ Church, where he served up delicacies such as mice on toast, pickled horse tongue, puppies, hedgehog, crocodile and bear.