When I first read The Transit of Venus, I was rather underwhelmed. I was in my twenties then and recently back in Australia after a period when I had thought I would make my life in France. I came to Shirley Hazzard's third novel by way of The Bay of Noon and The Evening of the Holiday. These ravishing early novels, both set in Italy, fed my nostalgia for Europe. I identified intensely with their young female protagonists whose private dramas were lifted into grandeur by the antique backgrounds against which they played out.

Film choice

The move of MI6 in the late Nineties from modest, relatively covert premises (though bus conductors were prone to yell, "Spies alight here") to one of the most glossily ostentatious buildings in London was not welcomed by many of the staff, who referred to their new home as Legoland.

'Longing', a play based on two short stories, opens next year, the writer tells Susie Mesure

A penthouse overlooking Havana's Malecón seaside wall is a new breed of 'casa particular', says Claire Boobbyer

Six renowned authors from the past century have been shortlisted for a prize to recognise the best ever winner of Britain's oldest literary award.

From swirls of colour to geometric metal patterns, Trish Lorenz unrolls the latest wallpaper trends

Saturday

Christopher Graham tells Leveson Inquiry that tackling case of private eye Whittamore is 'impractical'

My best holiday memories aren't of sunsets or dolphin sightings but of wallowing in the shallow end of a swimming pool, giant inflatable ring wrapped around my middle, my face shaded by a fat paperback. I can't brag about the quantity of my beach reading like some: I'm slow, easily distracted, and usually only notch up two novels over a fortnight's break even while my hungrier holiday companions tear through one Penguin Classic after another.

This fabulously over-ripe adaptation of Graham Greene's razors'n'rosaries gangster novel starts as a cheeky film-noir homage, but it soon tips over into self-parody: no scene is complete without some rolling thunder, some religious icons, and music so bombastic that Dr Frankenstein would have it on his laboratory iPod.

In his excellent new book, The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson examines the 20 key indicators of a psychopath – they're manipulative/ cunning, they lack remorse or guilt, and so on. Pinkie Brown, Graham Greene's enduringly vile hoodlum, just about ticks every psychotic box, and Richard Attenborough was sensational as the juvenile gangster-by-the-sea in the Boulting brothers' peerless 1947 adaptation.