From Viking magical mead poetry to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, here’s how writers have encapsulated an eternal boozy truth

Du Maurier’s novel is a tightly plotted, sinuous and undeniably feral piece of work that puts power in the hands of women

The world of work may have changed since 1974, but Working still has relevance for those of us in the workplace today

Ahead of a public reading, Philippe Sands explores the lessons of Levi’s humanity-filled holocaust memoir

Violence, cruelty and sexual confusion are as much a part of boarding school literature as japes and cricket. Alex Renton surveys a troubled genre from Kipling to Rowling

With her paintings and tales based on dreams, animals and the occult, Carrington was an uncanny original. Marina Warner salutes the artist on her centenerary

Amit Chaudhuri revisits a masterful tale of revellers stranded at a hotel, which recalls Joyce and Woolf but resembles neither

From Ulysses to Last Orders, many novels have embraced a whole life, while dwelling on the passing of mere hours. Graham Swift on the importance of immediacy

What if the Italian civil servant whose name became shorthand for devious politics was trying to warn us about the despots, not advise them?

AL Kennedy celebrates a craftsman who viewed his work as a lifelong apprenticeship

Following a young couple in 1960s France, A Sport and a Pastime asks how we make sense of romance and tells the truth about sexual love

From the story of a homeless ex-addict to the life of an anonymous diarist: meet the writer intent on refreshing a genre

When it was first published, Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle was derided as the musings of a shipwrecked mind. Ninety years on, this section of Finnegans Wake offers a late example of his great, radical vision

In Agnes Grey we find a governess’s life depicted with shocking realism – and a clear model for Charlotte’s masterpiece

An early short story by the queen of crime, The Witness for the Prosecution, will be broadcast on 26 and 27 December on BBC1

Publishing has witnessed a crimewave this year, with coppers providing a rich stew of corruption, villainy and remorse

Put off by A Passage to India in his teens, the author has rediscovered a wry, sly and subversive writer

Garth Greenwell first took solace from James Baldwin’s Paris novel Giovanni’s Room as a teenager. Sixty years after it was published, the prize-winning author acknowledges his debt to a classic of gay literature

Utopia has inspired generations of thinkers and writers to imagine the good – and evil – humans might be capable of. China Miéville rereads a classic

Written at the end of the cold war, Magris’s Danube glimpsed a common humanity at a time of imminent danger. Thirty years on, its message is even more powerful