New biographies of A.E. Housman and Evelyn Waugh expose their rural facades

J.L. Carr’s masterpiece A Month in the Country only runs to 85 pages. If only more writers realised that length isn’t everything

Skewering social stereotypes through interior decor

The Prose Factory is a spirited dash through British literary history — and the many ways writers have struggled to pay their bills

An exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery sheds light on the work of the Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup

"That is the lot of a girl in a Boy’s Own book: to cook the dinner and be less exciting than a tiger"

The artists and writers who pursued the muse in fin-de-siècle London and Paris

The art of regeneration

Ignore the advice of the freesheets handed out on the Tube. Why visit the hot spots in a city full of cool panoramic sanctuaries?   

Three decades of erudite correspondence between two of the greatest art historians of the 20th century

The long-overdue Ravilious revival

We may be right to be wary of the internet, but research and scholarship have benefited enormously from mass digitisation

Erich Kästner's books for children shows that that difficult ideas don't have to be kept from young readers

In the last year there has been a great Nairn revival - I would have loved to buy him a pint and hear him speak unpretentiously about his love of architecture

Under the capital, huge mechanical drills are digging rail tunnels that recapture the spirit of the most ambitious Victorian engineers

Abram Games's eye for clean graphic images transformed the world of posters and his art lives on in the London Underground today

The publisher wanted to offer impecunious readers a university in their own home. With the imprint's relaunch, that ambition lives on

Laura Freeman enjoys the fruit of Lisa Sainsbury's passion for art

The work of Eric Ravilious

Ernő Goldfinger’s landmark tower didn’t give working-class families the homes they deserved. High-rise has been a disaster

The city’s great chronicler hit the streets to cure his insomnia. His writing cast a spell on me and now I go for nocturnal walks of my own

Characterisation and a sense of place have been sacrificed for a magical realist atmosphere in Peter Ackroyd’s latest novel, Three Brothers

Finally, Birmingham has the library it deserves, and its predecessor will be thankfully turned to rubble

David Jones’s service at the front inspired an epic poem about World War I, “In Parenthesis”. Long neglected, it is ripe for rediscovery

We may mock the Young Conservatives of the Fifties but they were unswervingly loyal and a formidable electoral force