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.

Africa in the 1960s was dangerous and full of life. Van der Post's great adventure novel A Story Like The Wind (its must-read sequel is A Far-Off Place) is an African idyll destroyed by mercenaries heading for the Angolan war of independance. It's a mix of wildlife conservation and John Buchan. If you like your wildlife narratives given a desperate urgency, or you like your thrillers to ride on the back of the impala, this is the fireside read for you this winter.

He's not a forgotten author, The Witches of Eastwick is not forgotten either, but this is a book I really, really like, and it's all about witches. Updike writes about Rhode Island witchcraft as if it were European, and his devil is a money-splashing New York loudmouth. There's a hint of Lovecraftian occult in here too, but it's a great novel of innocent corruption and the simple pleasures of the coven. For those who like their snacks spicy and their hot tubs steaming.

Britain topples into the Second World War, and Barsetshire braces itself to deal with invaders: refugees, evacuees, foreigners, the lower-classes, and even socialists. Angela Thirkell's view of the war from the upper-class county perspective is a vision of the past as one part of it would have liked it to have been. She delights in caricature, satire, cutting down to size, and savage attacks on those who damage the glories of English civilisation. Pulling together, not shirking your turn in the communcal evacuees' canteen, being polite to the rude and being pleasant to the revolting are all part of the British Home Front at war. For readers who can do their own blackout and can cook rabbit stew.