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You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned. At the end of a day in which you cannot remember whether you took the car in or got your teeth cleaned, you sit before the TV and watch people discover who murdered a woman trapped in a locked room. You ready yourself for bed like the homeless preparing to launch themselves into a cold wind. You turn on the porch light to ward off the terrors every night brings, and there in the pale glow discover a web spread from firethorn to birch. You go out in your robe, your plaid pajamas, and sit…

     This is the third book in Alberto Angela’s astonishing trilogy about life in Ancient Rome. The previous two – Empire and Les 3 Jours de Pompeii – were really good: a journey around the Roman Empire imagined through the travels of a one sesterce coin, and an hour-by-hour account of the days leading up to and immediately following the volcanic eruption which annihilated Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79CE. This one is self-evidently about the daily life and routines of the Eternal City. Angelo chooses a Tuesday some time in 117CE, when the empire was at its greatest extent.

Angela is a well-known writer and historian in Europe, not really known here although Empire is available in English as The Reach of Rome. It’s definitely popular history in its tone, rather than an academic work, but it very definitely is not dumbed-down: every article, object or…

In October 1941 Ravilious’ work as a war artist took him to Fife where he lodged with John and Christine Nash at Crombie Point Cottage near Dunfermline.

On the 20^th October he wrote to his wife Tirzah: I was so pleased to find your letters and the parcel (most welcome to Christine) when I came home today from my ship….I’m glad Ironbridge is warming up for the Essex winter………Christine has just gone off to London and possibly Wiston so may perhaps see you. She is a wonderful person in any house, and gets us all up with tea in the morning and a splendid breakfast then lights my fire if I work at home and goes off to Dunfermline for beer and cigarettes. What more could you want?

John and Christine Nash.

On the 17^th November 1941 Eric wrote to Tirzah from John and Christine Nash’s cottage at…

A few weeks ago, I posted a list of some of my favourite novels set in hotels, featuring much-loved modern classics such as Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. The post proved quite a hit, with many of you adding your own recommendations in the comments. Many thanks for those suggestions – I now have several excellent possibilities to check out!

As promised in the ‘hotels’ post, here’s my follow-up piece on boarding-house novels, an interesting variant on the theme. While boarding houses have been around since the 19^th century, they were particularly common in the first half of the 20^th century, offering each ‘boarder’ the opportunity to rent a room cost-effectively, particularly in towns or cities.

Just like hotel guests, every boarder comes with their own backstory, habits and peculiarities, throwing up the…