Surveying the cornucopia in our supermarkets, we may think that this is a time of unparalleled choice for fruit and vegetables, but the Victorians would have tutted at the Spartan monotony of our diet.

If you want to give your children a taste for travel, or show them the world without leaving the bedroom – perhaps the preferable option in these lean times – then take a trip through the monochrome world of Panorama, a new children’s book that adults seem to coo over as well. It is conceived by Fani Marceau and realised by the illustrator Joëlle Jolivet. Jolivet is the prolific artist responsible for, among other books, the bestselling 365 Penguins.

This richly rewarding book explores the irony of how the devout medieval mind laid the basis for modern secularity. Using Chartres cathedral as a supreme example of the Gothic style, Ball explains that the soaring architecture – so otherworldly compared to "squat and gloomy" Romanesque – "encodes a renunciation of our poor, drab and degenerate world".

This is the age of the conspiracy theory. In the interstices of the internet, no global event happens by accident any more – or as it seems at first glance. While the truth is slowly getting its boots on, a paranoid counter-narrative is broadbanded across the world in a flash. We can all offer a list of conspiracies we have been told in a confidential whisper, backed up by a blizzard of small incongruent questions scraped together to make a fantastical answer.

Shortlists and prizes may indeed be good things, if they raise awareness of books in general (then again, they may not be); but having a women-only prize is an anachronism, plain and simple. You just have to consider the likely reaction to a new prize for male writers only (or should that be ‘non-women’ writers?) Or how about a literary prize open only to natural blondes?

Just as Lost In Translation extracts humour from present-day culture shock in Tokyo, so did the Dutch voyager Engelbert Kaempfer in the 17th century. He had to approach the Shogun “crouching with head to the floor like a lobster” before “performing innumerable monkey tricks”.