Cartography

Maggie O’Farrell’s two previous historical novels, Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, made her a household name. Land marks a return to her Irish roots: ‘Every family has its myths and ours was that my great-great-grandfather had worked on the early maps of Ireland.’ The year is 1865 and 31-year-old Tomás, a mapmaker, accompanied by his ten-year-old son Liam, is in the employ of the English redcoats and tasked with surveying and mapping Ireland from top to bottom, rocky outcrop to drumlin.

Versailles was a palace of science, as Anna Ferrari shows in this stimulating and innovative study, accompanying a dazzling exhibition of the same title at the Science Museum, London (until 21 April). Soldiers were subjected to electricity experiments in the Galerie des Glaces. The king watched the dissection of an elephant or a horse in the Menagerie. The latest globes and clocks, microscopes and barometers, miracles of precision and beauty, were, and in some cases still are, on display in the royal apartments. The gardens were exercises in trigonometry and hydraulics as well as planting. Louis XV had the largest and most varied plant collection in Europe.