The Perpetual Curate

From the moment of her mother's death, Lucilla Marjoriebanks knows her vocation - a conviction based on the influence of morally uplifting novels and the 'sublime confidence in herself is the first necessity to a woman on a mission'. The usurping of Dr. Marjoriebanks as master of his own table and the assuaging of Nancy, his formidable housekeeper, are but small steps in Lucilla's scheme, for she intends nothing less than the transformation of Carlingford society. Lucilla's 'evenings' become the talk fo this quiet country town: not only are they an essential source of gossip and entertainment for old friends and neighbours of Grange Lane, but they are also the setting for some of Lucilla's most startling accomplishments. For it is on these occasions, under the watchful eye and guidance of this magnificent young woman, that reputations are made and lost and romances are pursued and undone . . .

In these four brilliant short novels set in America, England and Paris, Rebecca West explores the lives and relationships of rich women and men who are ruled by 'the harsh voice we hear when money talks, or hate'.There is Josie, a flower of American girlhood whose boundless ambition for wealth fatally loosens the bonds of her marriage to Corrie. There is Etienne de Sevenac, a dilettante French aristocrat whose courtly stratagems are no match for Nancy Sarle - a plain but powerful American businesswoman. There is Alice Pemberton, a sensible Englishwoman - the very salt of the earth - but a petty tyrant in her gracious Georgian home. And lastly there is Sam Hartley, an American businessman who has fought his way to riches with his wife at his side, but whose life is now haunted by an abiding vision of beautiful young women.

Elusive and fantastical, Venice is a many-layered confection of history. The writers here have captured what is most important to them in pieces ranging from the city's foundation up to the present time. The voices, entirely diverse, are both international and native: here we meet Hans Christian Andersen, Paolo Barbaro, Bernard Berenson, Mary Braddon, Casanova, Chekov, Thomas Coryate, Gabriele D'Annunzio, John Evelyn, Hans Habe, Hermann Melville, Claude Monet, Margaret Oliphant, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Francesco Sansovino, Frances Trollope and Elio Zorzi.Variously a City of the Soul, The Watery City, The Merchant City, City Afloat, City at Play, The Cruel City, City of Courtesans, City of Arts, City of Flavours, The Haunted City and City of the Future, Venice is captured here in all her moods.

Like all her nice liberal friends Catherine Hope is determined to bring up her children with Tolerance, Understanding and without Fear. It seems to be working: Catherine's teenage daughter, Rachel, looks all set to get 'A's in everything.Suddenly Rachel wants to spend every weekend at her grandmother's country cottage, a place she had previously done everything she could to avoid. The reason? Marko: sultry, sexy countryside campaigner, out to save a threatened woodland from destruction, a woodland on the doorstep of Catherine's conventional and disapproving mother-in-law, Lavinia, who already reckons Catherine is a soft touch. What will Lavinia say apart from 'I told you so' about Rachel becoming a teenage road rebel?While Catherine's precious liberalism goes out of the window and she yearns to lock her daughter in her bedroom, Lavinia turns out to have hidden passions of her own. As the protest erupts around them, friendships are severed, loyalties divided and lives endangered. The dutiful daughter, model mother and gracious grandmother all find themselves changed for ever in this entertaining and moving story of the war between the generations.

In Espresso Tales, Alexander McCall Smith returns home to Edinburgh and the glorious cast of his own tales of the city, the residents of 44 Scotland Street, with a new set of challenges for each one of them. Bruce, the intolerably vain and perpetually deluded ex-surveyor, is about to embark on a new career as a wine merchant, while his long-suffering flatmate Pat MacGregor, set up by matchmaking Domenica Macdonald, finds herself invited to a nudist picnic in Moray Place in the pursuit of true love. Prodigious six-year-old Bertie Pollock wants a boy's life of fishing and rugby, not yoga and pink dungarees, and he plots rebellion against his bossy, crusading mother Irene and his psychotherapist Dr Fairbairn. But when Bertie's longed-for trip to Glasgow with his ineffectual father Stuart ends with Bertie taking money off legendary Glasgow hard man Lard O'Connor at cards, it looks as though Bertie should have been more careful what he wished for. And all the time it appears that both Irene Pollock and Dr Fairbairn are engaged in a struggle with dark secrets and unconscious urges of their own.

This beautifully illustrated guide to silver is as much for the reader with a broad interest in the decorative arts and their historical background as for the collector. Written by a team of experts, the book tells the story of the artistic evolution of silver from the earliest time to the present, in both Europe and North America. From being almost exclusively limited to ecclesiastical use in the Middle Ages, silver wares gradually appeared in a domestic environment, first on the tables of the Renaissance nobility, until the Victorian times when they were an essential item in the display cabinets of the middle classes. Appendices on the metals, assaying and hallmarking, and manufacturing techniques, together with 300 photographs, 100 in full colour - showing objects of historical importance and immense value and also those within the price range of the collector - make this the most comprehensive and highly illustrated book yet published on this fascinating subject.

First published in 1937, ORCHIDS ON YOUR BUDGET gives advice on all manner of subjects, from entertaining and creating the perfect capsule wardrobe to relinquishing the family estate. Lest you worry about how to put the advice into practice, each chapter concludes with a case study providing examples of women who heeded - and those lamentable souls who ignored - Marjorie's wise words.'It's not difficult to have fun out of economising (up to a point), both because of the sense of achievement it gives you and because everyone else is doing it, too ... A slight financial pressure sharpens the wits, though it needn't sharpen the disposition. But it takes an interesting person to have an attractive m?nage on a shoe-string and to run it with gaiety and charm ... Maybe you would rather play polo than pingpong, but if you've got an old pingpong set and no ponies, you'll get a lot more fun out of life from being a pingpong champion than from taking a dispirited whack with a polo mallet every now and then.