Best books… Roy Foster The emeritus professor of ...

The sale of a Fabergé imperial egg and a 15th-century triptych made headlines last year, but one of the most powerful pieces was a painting by Richard Parkes Bonington showing what he could have become, had he not died so young

LS Lowry is arguably England’s greatest artist. He painted a subject area that no one had ever painted before, the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, and became popular with the general public to

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

Catherine Clarke A History of England in 25 Poems400pp. Allen Lane. £25. Mark Forsyth Rhyme and ReasonA short history of poetry and people (forpeople who don’t usually read poetry)368pp. Allen & Unwin

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