At the end of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (ca. 1600), the titular prince delivers these dying words: “The rest is silence.” Joanna Stalnaker, a professor of French at Columbia University, adopts this line as the title of her fascinating book about 18th-century philosophers facing death, examining how Enlightenment thinkers—David Hume, the Comte de Buffon, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and more—wrote philosophically as they approached their deathbeds.

A person who is late is either imminent or dead; they might be stuck somewhere and still intending to arrive, or departed for ever and outside time. “Late” is the central story in Salman Rushdie’s new collection.

Kate Loveman’s The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary is a riveting account of how the diary was written, preserved, published and read through the centuries.

Guy de la Bédoyère’s The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His private revelations is a painstaking transcription and translation of all the “naughty bits” that previous editors were reluctant to print or keen to gloss over.

Sandra Lawrence transports us to the gnarled yews of Tom’s Midnight Garden, the scent of azaleas at Manderley and the Pillow Book’s chrysanthemums glistening with dew.

Buoyed by visions of immortality, Parisian hacks were ready to ‘explode’ in revolutionary fervour, but those who didn’t perish in the Terror would often struggle to make a living.

Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier-de-Breteuil, known as the Marquise du Châtelet after her marriage at age 18, was a brilliant philosopher in the French Enlightenment, whose reputation has too long been overshadowed by “great men.”.

During the heatwave of 2022 Mabey and his wife ‘felt more vulnerable, less in charge of our own territory’. The odd feeling of gardening during a climate change emergency was exacerbated by perceptions of ageing and Mabey’s recent dependency on a stick ‘the natural world’s first tool… my Instrument of Minimum Intervention’.

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916.

In his lucid and innovative book, “The Age of Revolutions,” Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, a professor at the University of Southern California, revisits the era and renders it more inclusive: Alongside the American and French, he discusses revolutions in Saint-Domingue (afterward Haiti) and Spanish America; the republican movement in Genoa; Hasidism; Protestantism and monarchic revolutions after 1800.

French author Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt and nominated for the International Booker prize, begins his new novel by quoting the Buddha: “In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal.”

Who’s afraid of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle? Virginia Woolf was. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf compared Cavendish, a 17th-century philosopher, poet and scientist, to a giant cucumber plant that had grown all over the carnations and roses in the garden and “choked them to death.”

In her new biography Jackie Wullschläger draws on private archival sources and more than 3,000 of the artist’s letters, published by Daniel Wildenstein in his five-volume catalogue raisonné (1974-91), few of which have been translated into English.

Robert Darnton traces the build-up of revolutionary sentiment during the reign of Louis XV before public anger finally erupted under his hapless successor.

A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them.

Claire Kilroy’s fifth novel – her first in more than a decade – is a confessional love letter from a mother, Soldier, to her young son, Sailor. It begins in the nadir of postnatal despair, during their first Easter together, when Soldier nearly abandons Sailor in a park on Good Friday.

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