A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England’s greatest novelists and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited.

Born in March 1896, Nancy Cunard was a great beauty, rich, promiscuous, with a mesmeric effect on men. She was also highly intelligent, reading widely and writing poetry. Of Nancy's many affairs the five included in this audiobook are the ones with the American poet Ezra Pound, the novelists Aldous Huxley and Michael Arlen (who characterised her as Iris Storm in his best-selling novel The Green Hat), Louis Aragon (the real founder of the Surrealist movement) and finally and controversially the black American pianist Henry Crowder, with whom she ran her printing press in Paris.

After the horrors of the First World War, Oxford looked like an Arcadia - a dreamworld - from which pain could be shut out. Soldiers arrived with pictures of the university fully formed in their heads and women finally won the right to earn degrees. Freedom meant reading beneath the spires and punting down the river with champagne picnics. But all was not quite as it seemed. Boys fresh from school settled into lecture rooms alongside men who had returned from the trenches with the beginnings of shellshock. 

Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. 

Pre-war debutantes were members of the most protected, not to say isolated, stratum of 20th-century society: the young (17-20) unmarried daughters of the British upper classes. For most of them, the war changed all that for ever. It meant independence and the shock of the new, and daily exposure to customs and attitudes that must have seemed completely alien to them. For many, the almost military regime of an upper class childhood meant they were well suited for the no-nonsense approach needed in wartime. 

The lasting reputation of George V is for dullness. He was a crack shot and an outstanding stamp collector, but that's about it. The flamboyance and hedonism of his father, Edward VII, defined an era whose influence and magnetism is still felt today. The contrast between the two could hardly be greater.

From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; and Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read. The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries.

A delicious romp, Noble Ambitions pulls us into these crumbling halls of power, leading us through the juiciest bits of postwar aristocratic history - from Mick Jagger dancing at deb balls to the scandals of Princess Margaret. Capturing the spirit of the age, historian Adrian Tinniswood proves that the country house is not only an iconic symbol, but a lens through which to understand the shifting fortunes of the British elite in an era of monumental social change. 

They were known as the Mitford sisters: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as 'bright young things' in the high society of interwar London. Then, as the shadows crept over 1930s Europe, the stark - and very public - differences in their outlooks came to symbolize the political polarities of a dangerous decade.

Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional Prime Minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last five years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life.

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

First published in 1988 - just four years after Capote's death - Clarke paints a vivid behind-the-scenes picture of the author's life, based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the man himself and the people close to him. From the glittering heights of notoriety and parties with the rich and famous to his later struggles with addiction, Capote emerges as a richly multidimensional person - both brilliant and flawed. 

Clive Bell is perhaps more well-known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who championed young artists, he defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. For decades Bell has been a shadowy figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings Bell to the forefront.

From its dawn in the 1660s to its twilight in the 1960s, Cliveden was an emblem of elite misbehaviour and intrigue. Conceived by the Duke of Buckingham as a retreat for his scandalous affair with Anna-Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, the house later served as the backdrop for the Profumo affair. In the 300 years between, the house was occupied by a dynasty of remarkable women each of whom left their mark on this great house.

Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. It is an unusually humane account of Europe from the closing years of the 19th century through to World War II, seen through the eyes of one of the most famous writers of his era.