So, it’s autumn. No need to be depressed. There are apples, blackberries, damsons and bright, golden woodlands to be enjoyed for a few months yet before winter draws in.

A distant prospect of a life of ease in the Big House is intoxicating to many. Nevertheless, not everything is necessarily as wonderful as it seems and the servants in particular can be a frightful problem.

The Hungarian writer and Nobel prizewinner Imre Kertész, who has died aged eighty-six, was deported to Auschwitz aged fourteen. Pondering on that experience, and more broadly on totalitarianism, was to provide him with the material for his life’s literary work.

Creative writers would seem to be well equipped to muse on certain lives they cannot have known. And why not the mysterious lives of their own parents, or that portion of those lives which occurred before the writing offspring were even born?

The eminent Italian novelist, critic, journalist and philosopher of books and libraries has read his last. Though a preeminent man of books, he was rather relaxed about the fact that there were things he hadn’t read.

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century many people were beginning to take the measure of the parasitical landowning classes. None put it all quite so succinctly as Robert Burns, born on this day in 1759.

When icicles hang by the wall and you stop by woods on a snowy evening, it’s time for a list of the best poetic celebrations of winter.

January 6th: a day to eat king cakes, for women to sit back and put their feet up – sometimes – and for well-meaning men to get their comeuppance

Like Floyd Mayweather Junior in boxing, Costa poetry winner Don Paterson is not just technically immaculate; he hurts, hitting hard and gifted with a true fighter’s armoury of punches.

Nancy Mitford was one of the famous Mitfords. Her sister Unity fell in love with Hitler and shot herself when war broke out. Nancy’s sparkling and mildly satirical novels of class have been reissued by Penguin with new covers that can only be described as spiffing.