Eliot guarded her privacy closely, but her novels explore themes of sacrifice and restraint, and her heroines are studies in the impossibility of having it all

The answer is, we shall never know – but one Norwegian colonel’s quick decision may have ensured Churchill’s premiership and the success of Dunkirk

Five women in their nineties dine together monthly, keeping loneliness at bay with gossip, advice and reminiscence

Sexually assaulted as a teenager, Christiana Spens describes her life of perpetual anxiety – until the birth of her son ‘transforms everything’

After his mother’s murder, the teenage Ellroy seemed lost to speed and alcohol – until his discovery of crime writing led to a different addiction

When distraught teenage Orla embarks on a secret pilgrimage to her mother’s grave, she meets a ‘mad hairy’ man with miraculous powers

St Cuthbert’s body, rescued from the ‘devilish Danes’, is carried for hundreds of years to its eventual shrine in Durham cathedral

Benjamin Netanyahu has won a staggering sixth term in office – but his alliance with the disreputable right is inching Israel close to catastrophe

The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie regales us with stories of mistaken identity, hymns with erotic undertones and an archbishop’s surprising take on Lenten penance

A mathematics professor, who specialises in the idea of nothing, is approached by a would-be Bond villain with a dastardly plan of annihilation

But the big ideas seem mainly to consist in acquiring new skills – like boxing and baking – and flexing the imagination muscle

Nicholas Spencer insists they are – and his scientific knowledge is impressive. But do his religious arguments carry weight?

The Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moves from São Paulo to ‘reforest’ herself in the Amazon, and slowly gains the trust of a wary, isolated tribal people

A French widower’s horror at his elder son’s involvement with the Front National grows ever deeper as violence escalates

After landing in Surat in 1615, Sir Thomas Roe was studiously ignored, and months passed before he was finally received by the Mughal emperor

Whether it was from hurt, spite or genuine fascist sympathies, his surprise at his family’s response simply confirms his stupidity

When a midwife in Nagyrév started doling out arsenic in 1911, dozens more women followed suit, until the death toll became impossible to ignore

New York’s Atelier 17 became a creative hub in the 1940s, where émigré Surrealists shared ideas with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell

A marine biologist attempts to explore a newly discovered mid-Atlantic trench, but finds its destructive power both attracts and repels all who approach it

Ten women, on average, are killed there every day – and Cristina Rivera Garza’s investigation of her sister’s murder is met with the usual ‘silence of impunity’