Robert Kagan’s latest book is a short but powerfully written argument about the return of great power conflict and the danger of believing that history is moving towards a world of liberal democracies living at peace with one another. The prospect of “a new era of international convergence” has faded. “History has returned,” he announces, and — however embattled the democracies may be — they “must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them”.

Kagan somewhat overstates his case when he suggests that great power competition has been on the increase in recent years and that a 19th-century diplomat would instantly recognise the “elaborate dances and shifting partnerships” of today’s great power competition. Great power competition did not disappear with the end of the Soviet Union, but it is not clear that it is getting worse in recent years.

Writing history is rearranging the furniture, bringing a disregarded item into the light, polishing it up, finding surprises in the drawers. That is what Ophelia Field has done in The Kit-Cat Club, a bold and hugely entertaining book. We know what the members looked like from their portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller for the publisher Jacob Tonson. At Barn Elms, west of Putney, where Tonson’s house became the club’s summer quarters, the portraits lined the walls of the room where the living originals talked and drank. Men only, of course. Women were ornamental. Chosen beauties — the Kit-Cat “toasts” — became celebrities. Marital domesticity came nowhere.

The posthumous publication of a book never completed by an author to his satisfaction may usually be dismissed as an act of family piety, or, less generously, as the scraping of the barrel. But not this one. The Invention of Scotland is uncommonly interesting. It is written with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s characteristic grace and pungency, and it is agreeably provocative.

Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant remain two of the most significant and beguiling thinkers produced by the revolutionary age. Yet until now, no full-length account has been written about their notorious affair, and it is this gap that Renee Winegarten sets out to fill. She has every reason to do so. The liaison dominated Constant’s and Mme de Staël’s lives for 17 years between 1794 and 1811. It exercised a major influence on their thought and writings, and encompassed an impressive walk-on cast including Napoleon, Talleyrand, Goethe and Byron. Its story illuminates the history of Europe at one of its most important and dramatic junctures.

Mark Mazower is an historian for whom the spectres of Fascism, Nazism and Communism haunt the continent of Europe. Driving these ideologies was a sense of national or racial superiority and this infected whole populations. In previous books, Mazower has shown with alarming clarity how many of the European states proved unable in the 20th century to safeguard liberal democracy, national frontiers or the survival of minorities. Tens of millions of people died as a result.

Andreï Makine is a remarkable novelist. He joins a select band — Conrad, Nabokov, Beckett and Kundera — who have published in a language that is not their mother tongue.

Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, in 1957. He learnt French as a child, and sought asylum in France in 1987. As a penniless émigré, without papers or a support network, he slept rough in the cemetery of Père Lachaise while writing his first novel, in French. Notoriously, it was at first rejected by publishers, who refused to believe that a Russian could write good French: A Hero’s Daughter was only accepted when he pretended it was a translation from Russian. In 1995, his fourth novel, Le Testament Français, became the first novel ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médici.