From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals

A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National ...

Dan Sperrin State of Ridicule A history of satire in English literature 816pp. Princeton University Press. £38 (US $45). In State of Ridicule: A history of satire in English literature, Dan Sperrin ha

Your indispensable guide to the capital

Train Landscape , 1940, watercolour on paper, 17¼in ...

The most sensual pictures of women sprang from Ovid’s verses, the Aeneid gave Turner his longest-lasting subject matter and Edward Burne-Jones saw himself in Arthur’s deathless slumber. Carla Passino explores how literature influenced art