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All organic beings descended from a single primordial blob, according to Darwin. Some of them developed sufficiently to leave the commodious depths and widths of the sea to scramble ashore. Was that wise? In this intricately detailed history, David Miles, a distinguished Oxford archaeologist, takes up the story of human evolution since our species and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor about seven million years ago. Between the origin of our life on Earth and the exponential population growth that causes long queues and traffic jams and threatens imminent apocalypse, there was a period when change amounted to beneficial progress.

To call Nils Büttner a killjoy is perhaps a little unfair, but not very. The professor at Stuttgart’s State Academy of Art and Design has written a revisionist biography of Hieronymus Bosch: one which tells us that the Early Netherlandish painter wasn’t, as many over the centuries have suggested, the devil incarnate or Satan’s crazed representative on earth. Instead, his graphically disturbing visions of hell — infernal soups populated by hybrid monsters — were actually the product of a devoutly Catholic, medieval mind.

Fifty years ago this summer, a new show appeared on American TV screens. These, the opening titles explained, were the voyages of the starship Enterprise; its mission — to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations. Half a century later the Star Trek franchise still rumbles irrepressibly on, but now the first part of the Enterprise’s mission has moved firmly from the realms of science fiction into those of fact. The change is profound: in 2016 we can look up at a night sky full of stars and know that almost every one of them has its own family of planets orbiting around it, just as the Earth and the other planets of our solar system orbit the Sun.

‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking.’ Life is always cheap in noir fiction — but it takes it that step further when the protagonist’s homicidal impulses extend to himself. The hero of this fast-moving, agreeably violent and perfectly pared-down novella is Joe, a former FBI agent and marine who has reduced what remains of his life to a sliver of deadly purpose. After a gruesome incident in his past, ‘his limit for trauma, a very high limit, had been reached’ and he went completely off his onion.

On 11 January 2016 Paul Morley was awoken by an urgent voicemail from the Today Programme. Could he talk about the life and — news just in — the death of David Bowie? (The researcher apologised if this was how he’d heard.) Resistant to gnashing his teeth for a few minutes of radio rent-a-commentary, Morley uncharacteristically ignored this and sundry other requests. Instead he wrote these 500 pages in ten weeks. The same time, he says, that Bowie needed to cut albums at his cocaine-powered peak. The Age of Bowie is not strictly a biography, with such things as dates and sources and supporting quotations.

All parents worry about the extent to which their children will expose their private weirdness to the world. They tell their teachers that Daddy takes his tea into the toilet and Mummy ‘actually pulled the car over’ for a closer look at the dead badger they passed on the school run. But the traumatic new memoir by the journalist Ariel Leve lifts the lid on a whole new league of maternal craziness. Although Leve disguises her mother as ‘Suzanne’ in this book, a quick google reveals her to be the poet and feminist film-maker Sandra Hochman. When People magazine’s Patricia Burnstein visited Hochman’s ‘elegantly appointed’ Manhattan penthouse in 1976, it seemed that mother and daughter lived a loving bohemian idyll.