Michael Ledger-Lomas

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality and gender, scripture is often contradictory.

Recent books by Greg Eghigian, Joshua Blu Buhs and Jeffrey J. Kripal demonstrate the challenges that historians face in making sense of Fortean times.

In Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders explores the commercialisation of grief and those who resisted the era’s conspicuous consumption.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope is a Whiggish history of humanism from the Renaissance to the present.

As the accession of Edward VII shows, a new British monarch must represent the nation’s values – whatever that nation and those values are.