There was a night as a boy when I couldn’t sleep ahead of a football match, too wired by thoughts of the sporting heroics I might achieve—or fall short of—the next day. While tossing and turning in my

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

Lola Young Eight Weeks Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds 336pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99. Lola Young has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2004. She is also an emeri

In 1990, the sculptor Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of the sitting room of a vacant London house in plaster of Paris to create “Ghost”, a work which the critic Jonathan Jones described as “the so

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en