Only whisper it, but some of us prefer John Updike's essays to his dissections of suburbia.

How to feast Roman style, from vineyard snails to wafers

This stylish history of a long, aristocratic line shows how the clan reflected the fortunes of a country

Does this rational trawl through the Good Book for its material basis miss its scientific value?

Now a weightless pastime, ballooning once made a solid contribution to science and to war

I first read Brave New World in 1949. I was a frivolous 18-year old studying economics at St Andrews. There had always been favourite books.

This first half of a two-book biography starts with the infamous folkie heckle of 1966, "Judas!" Dylan's response: "You're a liar", then "Play fucking loud".

The wunderkind of British design compares this magnificent survey of his 3-D creations to "putting flowers in a flower press".

As difficult second albums go, this is a fine follow-up to Lalwani's feted debut novel, which shows the growth of an elegant young talent.

To many younger readers, Ian McEwan's super-smart Cold War entertainment will function as a history lesson as much as a delicious box of story-telling tricks.

Though Stiglitz's glorious assault on unfettered markets is directed mainly at the US ("Of the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent"), we have scant grounds for complacency.

Get beyond the vaguer-than-vague title and this is some book: a minor-key masterpiece of restraint, invention and the fine art of keeping expectations deliberately low, then elegantly surpassing them. Nostalgia is set in the fictitious Tuscany town of Castelluccio, home to expat British painter Gideon Westfall, a successful but defiantly unfashionable exponent of neo-Neo-Classicism .

To begin with, Lauren Beukes had an idea so perfectly simple it sounds like an elevator pitch: "time-travelling serial killer".

Here is a double treat for aficionados of Peter Stamm's small canvases of precision as he maps the imprecision of human emotion. Two collections of short stories are published together in Michael Hofmann's taut translations. Stamm's mood pictures capture, claustrophobically, his characters' internal worlds, and his commitment to "making literature out of ordinary people's lives".

Cricket's quickies and spinners tend to get far more attention than the medium-pace men, but the pantheon of seamers, swingers and off-stump naggers celebrated here by Harry Pearson reminds us what an integral part of the game bowlers operating largely in the 50-75mph zone have been down the years.