Janet Malcolm wrote for the New Yorker for almost sixty years on literature, photography and fine art, the miscarriage of justice, psychoanalysis and interior design – but she was suspicious of biography.

Claire Harman, a distinguished literary biographer, has written a wonderful book to mark the centenary of Mansfield’s death. Determined to consider the work and life in tandem, Harman chooses ten of Mansfield’s short stories, some renowned, some obscure, and discusses them in connection with her life.

After her exile from France in 1870, the wife of Napoleon III purchased a Hampshire estate to house a nostalgic collection of family memorabilia.

Amit Chaudhuri’s eighth novel, Sojourn, is a beautiful meditation on memory set during a temporary stay in Berlin. The unnamed narrator is a visiting professor fifteen years after the fall of the Wall. He has been in the city once before, but, in 2004, has little memory of it.

True to Nature is a perfectly timed exhibition. The European trend for landscape painting en plein air between 1780 and 1870 resonates with the resurgence of interest in the natural world that the lockdowns inspired, as well as contemporary concern for our threatened habitat.

Set in Belfast over four intense days and nights of bombing during the Blitz in 1941, These Days is a beautiful homage to the city, its suffering and people. It is also an eloquent meditation on the transience of love and beauty, the fact that moments in time are all anyone ever has, until suddenly they stop.

The French Mind by Peter Watson review - are the French exceptional? Mais, oui. The cultural history of France is told through the chatter of salons and the women who ran them, says Ruth Scurr

France: An Adventure History by Graham Robb review - Vive la France! A quirky chronicle of our neighbour. From Julius Caesar to Covid via Napoleon’s flowerbeds: Ruth Scurr enjoys this witty, free-ranging homage to the French people.

The Georgians - the age that shaped Britain, for good and bad