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In 1973, in White Plains, New York, Donna Freed was told, in a ‘shroud of shame’ and without any soothing explanations, that she was adopted. The six-year-old’s life was plunged into a dark hinterland of anxiety. Freed spent the next 38 years fearful that the discovery of her birth mother would reveal ‘a terrible or seedy story, tragic circumstances, terror, violence, incest or rape’. In fact the truth awaiting her was a sensation straight out of a Hollywood film noir: a scandalous tale of dirty glamour, passion and pseudocide. Her parents were in fact embroiled in one of the juiciest death fraud cases of 1960s America. Duplicity is a Janus memoir, part adoption story, part true crime history.

Are all institutions basically corrupt? If company directors snaffle pencils from the stationery cupboard for their own use, are they corrupt? Is there a sliding scale of corruption, from ‘whatever’, through to ‘well I wouldn’t do it myself’, all the way to ‘summon the rozzers’? And does it matter what the organisation is? Is it worse to steal from your employer if you work for Nestlé or for Oxfam? Are some small corruptions are basically all right? Of course if we accept the small corruptions, the bigger ones creep in at the edges. And once they’ve entered an organisation’s culture, it is well nigh impossible to root them out. In essence, Tom Harper’s book is a thoroughly depressing account of the Metropolitan Police’s corruptibility.

‘What brings strong personalities to power?’ asks the historian Ian Kershaw. ‘And what promotes or limits their use of that power?’ Those two questions are at the centre of this book, a study of some of the 20th century’s most important leaders. The result is partly an analysis of character, but also an attempt to gauge how much history’s main players directed world events, and how much events directed them. Kershaw begins with Lenin, whose rise was punctuated by huge strokes of luck. For one thing, his mother was willing to support him financially for his entire life. She must have had a very forgiving nature as, in Kershaw’s arrow-sharp description, Lenin was an exceptionally tedious, unpleasant man. He was ‘punctiliously insistent on pedantic forms of order.

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation. The dictator didn’t last as long as that. Fatos served 17 years, partly in Spaç, partly in other camps.  It wasn’t difficult to get on the wrong side of the paranoid Hoxha.

This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was ‘dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing’, and when they married, his father, whose own people had been refugees from the pogroms in Ukraine, was delighted that he’d found a Jewish girl. After her death, which ‘ripped me in two’, writes Seldon, he threw himself into his work – his prodigious writing and the vice-chancellorship of Buckingham University, which his father had helped found.

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation. Some queried his generous gift on the frankly snobbish and anti-Semitic grounds that it was not for upstart Jewish businessmen to force their likenesses into a national collection. The Conservative MP Sir Charles Oman went so far as to say in the Commons that ‘these clever but extremely repulsive pictures should be placed in a special chamber of horrors and not between brilliant examples of the art of Turner’.