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A truncated Paper Chase this week. What can I say? I'm selling my house, I'm off for a long weekend campervanning to Wanganui (why does that never cease to amuse me?) and time slips away. One country only: Britain. Anglocentric, moi?
Take away all that tiresome thinking for
yourself when choosing what to read with the Daily Telegraph's 110 best books: The perfect library.
What is it they say about owners and their dogs? Clock Adam Mars-Jones and his marvellous mutt as he is interviewed about his first novel, a mere 25 years after he was named one of the Best Young British Novelists on the basis of his wonderful Lantern Lecture collection of novellas (the best of which has the Queen getting rabies from one of her corgis).
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion explains the challenges of writing about 109-year-old Harry Patch, the last surviving World War I soldier.
If you're one of the three people in the world never to come across a Jodi Picoult interview, here you are.
Last week, the Sunday Times described it as Salman Rushdie's worst novel, this week the Telegraph says The Enchantress of Florence is his best. Reviews, really, they aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Niall Griffiths reviews Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel, Alma Colgan author Gordon Burn's meditation on the leading events of the last British summer: Tony Blair's resignation, Gordon Brown's inauguration, Madeleine McCann's disappearance and the thwarted London bombings.
In non-fiction, the paper goes from the highbrow of critic Alfred Kazin and Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics by Stefan Collini to Amy Winehouse and the "erotic vagrancy" of Richard Burton. Those last two are different books, it should be said. Sadly, Burton didn't live to meet Amy Winehouse.
How's this for a précis of the quintessential French existentialist novel: "A young announcer of train schedules at the Gare du Nord drifts through life and Paris with no real sense of identity or purpose until she ends up in London." Voice Over by Celine Curiol is reviewed in the Financial Times.
There's a review of the reissue of Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture and of a biography of World War I poet Isaac Rosenberg.
The Independent interviews the great children's picture book writer Emily Gravett.
The Daily Mail has classic Daily Mail fodder – a real-life Victorian whodunit.
The Times and Sunday Times have an extract from a memoir revealing The real Lady Thatcher.
At the other end of the political spectrum, there is peace campaigner Rachel Corrie.
Melvyn Bragg talks candidly about the suicide of his first wife, which forms part of his new autobiographical novel, Remember Me.
A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Carole Seymour-Jones is reviewed.
In the Guardian, David Hare describes bringing Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking to the stage.
Artists respond to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe.
There's more from that real-life Victorian whodunit – this time from the author herself, Kate Summerscale.
And Alexander McCall Smith rereads Barbara Pym.
Among the reviews, another of the Gordon Burn novel, and there's The Butt, the latest from Will Self.
The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg is a debut novel about the dying days of Rhodesia.
In the Observer, all hail Virago on its 30th anniversary.
There is an interview with Salman Rushdie, too – how good does he think his new novel is?
The exhibition of art inspired by Edgar Allen Poe is reviewed.
The lead review is of Misha Glenny's McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers.
In the magazines, the Literary Review has The World is What It is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming by Nigel Lawson and Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory by Lisa Jardine.
The Times Literary Supplement is either a broad church or dumbing down with its review of Eric Clapton and Patti Boyd autobiographies.
JG Ballard's Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton – An Autobiography gets the long treatment in the London Review of Books.
* This posting was compiled to the following soundtrack (intermittently, over many hours): Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up (Numero) ; Beloved: Mojo Presents a Treasury Of Classic British Indie Rock (magazine cover mount); and Quatuor Mosaiques' Joseph Haydn: Quatuors Opus 33 No 5, 3, 2. Don't even begin to ask about the chain of thought that led to this.
