Here Russian painters can be caught at the moment when they ceased to imitate their French and Italian contemporaries, as they had done under Catherine the Great, and started to discover their own distinct country of mysterious landscapes, fading light, desperate peasants and brooding great men.

ECONOMIST: Art from Russia

While Mr Inwood spends several pages describing the Great Fire of 1666, with the help of accounts by contemporaries such as Pepys and Clarendon, Mr Sheppard devotes a single paragraph to describing one of the seminal events in London's history before moving on to the rather less gripping subject of the planning regulations that governed the rebuilding of the city.

ECONOMIST: London uncovered