Explore the vast range of titles available.

Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage, E.H. Young's Miss Mole, and Ivy Compton-Burnett's A House and Its Head are inter-war, middlebrow, domestic and detective novels characterized by narrative ambiguity and illusion. Through the voice and gaze of their spinster protagonists, socially marginal, yet potentially transgressive figures, these novels covertly query power and gender relations, while simultaneously upholding the status quo. Each novel's techniques of focalization and narration are reviewed in order to demonstrate how normalizing concepts of home and heterosexual families are explored and critiqued. During cataclysmic events like murder or the death of a mother, ways of seeing are pushed to the fore. Yet in each case, once the cataclysmic event is resolved, the conventional order is restored by the effective surveillance of these spinsters.

[James] begins well - Mim is a former actress, who gave it up when her second child came along, and is now, in late middle-age, being called for an audition for an ad about a special anti-ageing pill. The ad falls through, much to her relief, but she still has to deal with her spiteful, elderly father, her evasive, slacker forty-something son, and her cold and distant daughter.

Pick any novel in Ivy Compton-Burnett's magnificent idiosyncratic series, persevere for the first few chapters and you are hooked.

RC Blows adds a couple of literary butlers to a list of literary valets, and says that even Jeeves might find it hard to beat Ivy Compton-Burnett's creations (Letters, 17 January).

To your list of literary butlers (Ten of the Best, 10 January) might be added those created by Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Irrationality and imbalance are inherent components of this mindset. 'Sounds like narcissism to me,' says one of Auslander's friends, listening to the latest instance of God's manic persecution: 'He never gets bored of you, does he?' A TV screen in the bar behind them proves the point by churning out a modern litany from CNN ('bombings in Israel, killings in Gaza, murder in Darfur'). Auslander escaped as a teenager from the closed system of his upbringing by trips to the Metropolitan Museum backed up by a regular round of porn shops and drug-dealers. He had by this time progressed from shoplifting jelly babies and clothes to stolen copies of Kafka, Beckett, Pinter and Mamet ('I didn't always know what they were saying, but I sure liked the way they said it').

In a statement, [Michael Foster]'s MF Management said it expected \"a number of premier UK agents\" to join the new group, \"strengthening the agency's reputation in both talent and literary management\". Although PFD held on to a number of its authors, including the historian Simon Schama, Sir Max Hastings, Twiggy, Julie Burchill and mainly Conservative politician-writers such as Chris Patten, William Hague and Douglas Hurd, its list has a slightly ageing feel and it has struggled to attract new talent. Under the terms of the deal, Foster will merge his company with PFD and hold a controlling interest. Foster is agent to celebrities including Chris Evans, Billie Piper, Sam Neill, Julie Christie, Alan Davies and Bear Grylls.

In the era when [Ivy Compton-Burnett] was born, it used to be the custom for publishers to issue little volumes, sometimes bound in suede, containing extracts of \"wit and wisdom\" from favourite authors. She would lend herself well to this treatment. Here - from a variety of her novels - are some samples. \"To know all is to forgive all, but we can't let people know all, of course.\" (A Family and a Fortune). In a farce called More Women than Men, a young man describes his father's anger that he has chosen to become a teacher: \"He would never have expected me to teach in a girl's school. That if I choose to behave in an undignified manner for a pittance, that is my own affair. That is the best definition of work I have heard.\" Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a quotation often on Philip Larkin's lips.