Author, critic and traveler, Marina Vaizey, in her third lockdown essay, reflects on the books of figures in the changing façade of English society and the establishment.

Missing people, even with telephones and emails. And music and theatre even with the incredibly generous digital provision. Digital just proves, too, that at least for us oldies, the live event trumps all. Even the best CDs are tinny to my ear (which is not a great ear) compared to even - well, perhaps, not quite the worst - bad live performances.

And the cat pursues his independence. He disdains any other creature’s neediness and spurs the notion of any togetherness. It is reading - not domesticities or doing all the sorting and tidying that I have promised myself for so long, or fulfilling commissions to write - but reading that rescues the hours and days. 

Home with piles of books and what to read? Oddly, I discover looking at several thousand exhibition catalogues and monographs that art, although I have spent my life looking at what is portentously but I think accurately called material culture, does not save the world, however it may express the world.

So what books from the piles on the floor and the tables and the serried rows on the shelves have almost accidentally proved the most totally absorbing? Books I never thought I would read, and if so, enjoy, but are somehow here, acquired for reasons long lost in the mist of the past.