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It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga in their kitchen: what she writes about are families. Her books have a knack of chiming with current social concerns, of examining how the family is adapting to changing social mores. She is deservedly a very popular writer, but she isn’t a frivolous one. The Soldier’s Wife (Doubleday, £18.99) is a cracking read and has clearly been thoroughly researched. All the little details which animate a novel ring true. It centres on the homecoming of a Major who has been on a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, the effect of this supposedly joyous reunion on his wife and children — and himself.

Britain’s links with the Continent were once  deeper and more extensive than those of any other European country. Paris, Rome and German universities played as vital a role in British culture as many native cities. Mediterranean connections were especially strong. Most cities on its shores contain an English church and cemetery. From Minorca to Cyprus, there are few Mediterranean islands that have not been occupied by British troops: the oldest company in Beirut is Heald and Co., the shipping agents (est.1837). Blue-Water Empire aims to tell the story of ‘the British in the Mediterranean since 1800’: 1800 is the year that Malta, soon to be the headquarters of the British Mediterranean fleet, was conquered from France, with Maltese help.

Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to write, his friend Timothy Snyder proposed making this book — out of the edited transcripts of a long conversation they would conduct over several weeks in 2009. The book-as-conversation is, as Snyder points out in his foreword, a rather Eastern-European artefact. That’s apt to its content: Snyder is a historian of the region.

There is nothing quite like a good centenary to remind us how surprising it is that anyone got out of the 20th century in one piece. In the space of a few weeks this spring will be the 100th anniversaries of the Titanic and Captain Scott’s death, and from then on it’s going to be pretty much downhill all the way — the Balkans in 2013, Sarajevo in 2014, the Armenian massacre in 2015, Jutland and the Somme in 2016, the Russian Revolution, Spanish flu, Amritsar, civil war in Ireland, the rise of the dictators ... until before we know where we are it will be 2080 and — light at the end of the tunnel at last — the centenary of the birth of John Terry.