Another 1930s detective novel about drugs, but with more variety: not just cocaine, but cigarettes and the subjugation of the masses' free will by advertising. Dorothy L Sayers feeds her public's addiction for more Lord Peter Wimsey with Murder Must Advertise, a great novel about murder and treachery in the office lives of advertising executives and high diving in high society. For those who prefer a Daimler to a Ford.

Before he wrote The Sword in the Stone, T H White tried to gatecrash the 1930s party of detective novelists critiqueing their own society. He tackled drugs, murder, snobbery, loyalty, fast cars and literary allusion. He played with the conventions of the detective novel and produced a small but perfect classic of detective fiction. For readers who prefer to ride their horses astride.

It's not a novel, but it's great political reportage and polemic. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell takes us into scenes of 20th-century degradation and poverty that were commonplace, and inescapable, for hundreds of thousands of the British before the Second World War. He gets angry about waste and mismanagement, petty meanness and middle-class squeamishness. He is resentful at the public-school system for giving him complexes about the smell of the poor, and he's furious at the misery children grow up in if their fathers can't get work. For readers who want something to get angry about.

Oh, the joys of growing up in an underheated house with no education, lots of dogs, a medieval father and a title! Nancy Mitford's effervescent novel The Pursuit of Love is about English country house life and values, and is also a brilliant portrait of 1930s politics: she skewers capitalism, is puzzled by communism and embraces love. Children out-manoeuvre parents, the upper-classes out-vulgarise the bourgeois riches, but without the security of knowing that someone loves you, no-one can be happy. For romantics who wear little red flags in their lapels.

From January 2012 I'll be teaching two short courses in English literature in Brussels, Belgium. The classes will be fortnightly, fun, and very interactive. We'll be reading 5 books for each course, and each course fee is €75.00.

Course 1: British political fiction 1900-1950 (17 Jan, 31 Jan, 14 Feb, 28 Feb, 13 March) Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands; Constance Maud, No Surrender; Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others; Goerge Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier; Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love. Download the course description in PDF here.

Course 2: American women and work (17 April, 1 May, 15 May, 29 May, 5 June) Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl; Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country; Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark; Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Home-Maker, Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer. Download the course description in PDF here.

Want to know more? Send me a mail at kate.brussels [at] yahoo.com, and I'll send you the full course descriptions.

One of the more bracing novels about life on the Home Front during the First World War, which agonises over how one is to fight, if one cannot fight. All possible types of non-combatants appear here in a story about integrity, indifference, living and dying. Rose Macaulay, one of the most honest novelists of human nature, wrote in this novel a marvellous record of life as it really was lived. Buses, tea-shops, house-keeping, church-going, refugees, newspaper headlines, country walks and having fun at Earl's Court to blot out the thought of men dying across the Channel: all human life is here. For readers who want the details that matter.

Take a mill-girl and a lady of the leisured classes, as they plunge eagerly into the thrilling campaign for women's suffrage, and watch them work steadily from street lecturing to prison via the magistrates' courts, demonstrations in church, and a daring raid on a dinner party. Jenny Clegg loses her Lancashire accent, but will she also lose her Labour Party lover as she gets more involved with votes for women? Mary O'Neil is brave enough to be arrested, but can she survive her hunger strike and brutal force-feeding in prison? For readers who take their great-grandmothers seriously.

It's 1902, you're stuck for somewhere to spend your leave from the Foreign Office, and then you get a telegram inviting you to go duck-shooting on a yacht in the Baltic. But, when you get there, there are no ducks, and the yacht only has room for two, and your friend wants you to help him untangle an international spying game of treason and riddling identity changes. You also have to learn to sail, fast, in the first gales of autumn. The German navy are interested in your activities, and someone is trying to prove that you're a spy. Which you are, inadvertently. It's all rather awkward, but it's becoming a mission of national importance. For readers who don't mind oil stains on board as long as there is fresh bread once a week.

Dornford Yates was the master of the 1920s comic frivol and the gritty thriller of gentlemen heroes. He was a superb writer but also quite strong meat for those not used to the racy idioms of the 1920s. Adele and Co is a blend of his two favourite genres, and the first full-length novel featuring the immortal Berry and Co, five gentry cousins who have their jewels stolen in Paris and take their revenge with hard driving and a close reading of timetables and maps. Funnier than Wodehouse, and more thrilling than Buchan, Dornford Yates is for readers who appreciate tweed and pearls in their proper settings, with cocktails.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, Lolly Willowes, was about witches, self-reliance and the rights of single women to do what they wanted for themselves. It was a fashionable and critical hit when it appeared in 1926, and is still loved by its devoted fans. But civilised witches are less in fashion than they were. Lolly Willowes is about the subtle pleasures of witchcraft as a means to an end, when the ends are independence and some decent privacy from interfering families. For readers who walk in the woods rather than on the paths, and who prefer the smell of wet leaves to incense.