There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life.

This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession.

Essay collections are happily mainstream now, from Zadie Smith to Oliver Sacks, with more and more bits and bobs coming from unexpected quarters. These patchwork quilts from remarkable writers can be significant, nowhere more so than with those from Ursula K Le Guin that are collected here as her “Selected Non-Fiction”.

"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.

Michael Portillo has barely been off a train since leaving politics, taking journeys blending scenery and history: it must be a relief receiving plaudits for edutainment instead of the abuse habitually heaped on politicians.

What did the Romans do for us? On the evidence of new drama Britannia, they pillaged, murdered and tortured, but also found themselves mesmerised by the psychedelic Druid magic that hovered over our ancient land like fairy dust.

The Great Man theory of history is applied by Darkest Hour director Joe Wright to his star Gary Oldman as much as their subject Winston Churchill. Oldman’s performance is the sole, sufficient reason to see a film in which little else finally lingers.

“Are you aware that we’re making history?” demands Alexander Hamilton in the show that has finally made the lesser-known Founding Father an international household name. And whether its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, knew it when he wrote that line or not, making history is, indeed, what Hamilton is doing. The acclaim has been pretty much universal, the hype inescapable: 11 Tonys, a Grammy and a Pulitzer; celebrity fandom, and tickets as white-hot as they are hard to get your hands on.

Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem.

Long before Barack Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, the Voyager mission left the Earth driven by something else: the audacity of curiosity. What do the outer planets look like? What are they comprised of? And what’s beyond that?