In trying times we tend to seek comfort in the old and familiar, and boy have I been doing that lately. Amazingly, it was only last month I reviewed Robert Harris' apocalyptic novel, The Second Sleep, which, despite its chilling theme, seemed charmingly far-fetched. Cut then to my third week of social isolation, and the world appears to have tilted on its axis, if not disappeared from view altogether. It would be fair to say a certain ennui has set in. Time to bring out the big guns - by which I mean that tried and true antidote to the blues, Mr Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

This is not a review

When "The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in 1969 it was a pioneering work of feminist science fiction, a radical exploration of identity and sexuality. Set in the far distant future, in Le Guin’s fictional Hannish universe which features in much of her fiction, it explores the struggles of Genly Ai, an envoy sent by the Ekumen, an interplanetary federation of planets, as he attempts to complete his mission on the planet Gethen (Winter). He is tasked with getting Gethen to join the Ekumen but is frustrated by his inability to understand shifgrethor, a sophisticated code of conduct behind

Having only become aware and tuned into this excellent radio programme for the last ten years, it came as some surprise to me to learn that it's half a century old! It airs on RTÉ Radio 1 every Sunday morning at 9.10 am, opening with the trumpets of Samuel Scheidt's "Galliard Battaglia". Personal essays, poems, factual accounts are read out by their writer, with music played between each reading.

Meet Aurelio Zen, an Italian anti-hero detective. In Cabal, 1993, Zen is summoned to assist the Vatican in the investigation of an apparent suicide of a prince, who falls from one of St. Peter's balconies. Initially, Zen agrees with the verdict of suicide but the murders of a series of witnesses forces him to dig deeper. Dibdin is a superb writer. This really is a fantastic and pacey story with lots of intricate twists and turns. Zen himself is a very engaging and complex character with an intriguing private life. Dibdin also excels in his portrayal of the labyrinthine and frequently corrupt

In February 1862 at the height of the American Civil War, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, host a lavish state dinner in the White House. Upstairs in his room, their eleven- year old son, Willie lies ill, supposedly with the flu, but in fact the boy is dying of typhoid. The boy’s death leaves his parents devastated, particularly the president, already worn down by the carnage of the war. Following the funeral, the grief-stricken Lincoln visits the crypt and removes his son’s body from its coffin to hold him one last time. While his father grieves, the spirit of his son now materialises in a

The current fascination with vampires in popular culture probably begins with Interview with the Vampire rather than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s not hard to see why. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula is a charismatic figure, but one that is a threat to the patriarchal values of Victorian society and in a sense, he represents the challenges that social change presented to the author and his society. Most of his victims are women and he is destroyed in the end by a group of men, representative of the elite at that time. Rice presents a more sympathetic and psychologically complex picture of the vampire

V.I. Warshawski, the daughter of a Polish police officer and an Italian music teacher, is a complex, hard boiled and impoverished P.I. living in Chicago's downtown neighbourhood. Published in 1994, Tunnel Vision is based on the 1992 flooding of the tunnels under the Loop in downtown Chicago. V.I. comes across a homeless woman and her children in the basement of her derelict downtown office building. She mentions the family to Deirdre Messenger, a member of a shelter for abused women. When Deirdre's body turns up in V.I.'s office, she is up to her neck unravelling the lies and politics around

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) was the first woman elected to the Academie Francaise and a writer of great erudition, fluent in Latin, Greek and Italian as well as her native French. She was introduced to Classical Literature by her father, Michel-Renne Cleenewerck de Crayencour, a minor French noble who actively encouraged her literary ambitions. The Memoirs of Hadrian is her best- known work in the English-speaking world, an instant success when it was first published in 1951. The work had a long gestation. Yourcenar first contemplated writing a novel based on the Emperor’s own

Maisie Dobbs is a former maid and wartime nurse turned private investigator. In Birds of a Feather, set in 1930's London, she and her assistant, Billy Beale, are asked to find the missing daughter of a wealthy grocery magnate.They soon discover that three of the woman's friends have been murdered in a similar and unusual manner. The disappearance and the murders are linked and intriguingly lead them back to World War I. The traumatic effects of World War I on people's lives is explored in a thoughtful manner. Maisie herself is a fascinating and very likeable character. Her personal life and

The story is set in Europe in 1938 and 1939. It features the suave Nicholas Morath, an expatriate Hungarian and the co-owner of an advertising agency in Paris. His sumptuous and decadent lifestyle is brought to life in what is tantamount to a homage to pre-war Paris. Following Hitler's annexation of Austria, which signals trouble for Hungary, Morath is summoned to lunch by his uncle, Count Janos Polyani, an official in the Hungarian legation in Paris. Polyani entrusts Morath with a series of missions, which lead him from the Paris expatriate underworld to gloomy pre-war Eastern Europe. Furst