Charles Dickens Pictures from Italy 384pp. Oxford University Press. £176 (US $230). In November 1843, burnt out and living beyond his means, Charles Dickens resolved on a year-long sabbatical in Europ

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

Spotlight on readers’ excellent images and how they captured them

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Jennifer Buckley Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760 Ecologies of print 232pp. Edinburgh University Press. £95. Matthew P. Brown The Novel and the Blank A literary history of the book trades

The Italian Lakes are renowned for being the playground of the rich and famous, so it’s no surprise that the scenery is stunning, the climate good and there is beauty all around in the form of histori