Of the various books I read on holiday, the funniest and most charming (as well as much the shortest) was the late John Richardson’s account of the various houses he lived in – At Home – beginning with a late Victorian mansion in Upper Norwood (his father, hard to imagine, set up the Army and Navy stores), followed by Stowe, the Slade, life with Douglas Cooper in the Château de Castille, which he has already recorded in much more detail in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, East Seventy-Fifty Street, Connecticut, and Fifth Avenue, but downtown. The style is the most haute of haute bo (he describes a hillock as a ‘callipygian protuberance’). I loved it.