David Cameron has chosen a luxury villa in Tuscany as his summer holiday destination. The Prime Minister will spend a fortnight in an 18th-century villa, with swimming pool and tennis court, near the town of Mercatale Valdarno in the Chianti region.

The Crimson Petal and the White began as a bad laudanum dream: "This city is vast and intricate and you do not know your way around," said a female voice ominously, half warning and half threat. The London she moved through was – it was suggested – both a physical and a moral maze, a warren of squalid streets marked by odd visions: a grubby angel with swan's wings on his back, a crow-headed figure, a dying horse down on the cobbles. Things were just as feverish inside too, as Sugar – the whore hero of Michael Faber's bestselling Victorian pastiche – threaded her way past piglets and obese slatterns and pissing doxies to discover a friend dying, savagely beaten by her latest clients.

How I Lost the War is award-winning screenwriter Filippo Bologna's first novel. Set in Tuscany, the book is Bologna's antidote to the sun-drenched terracotta loveliness of the area so familiar to British expats and readers of Under a Tuscan Sun. This Tuscany is not rural and unspoilt. Indeed, his story is about the spoiling of it.

Every week we invite competing companies to give us their best deal for a specific holiday. Today: a seven-night holiday in Tuscany in mid-September. Prices are for two people travelling together.

Are you in the club? The wine club, that is? Until recently, there was only one major home-delivery service in it– and that was The Wine Society, the venerable Victorian, non-profit-making organisation, whose Postman Pat-like vans deliver high-quality wines to grateful households the length and breadth of the country. You have to have a share to be a member, but a £40 share is a small price to pay for handsome dividends over a lifetime. I say until recently, because for my money, the other hugely successful wine home-delivery specialist, Laithwaites, never really looked like offering the same degree of consistent value.