It's not at all what you think it is, although a lot of Rosy Barnes's novel Sadomasochism for Accountants takes place in a fetish club. Half of the characters are sweeties, the other half are vile: watch their comeuppance and enjoy the freeing of lonely, fettered souls. Great fun for all the family.

It;s the 1950s and Monica Dickens is a very junior reporter on a very local paper. It's always her turn to make the tea. She bicycles everywhere. She lodges with the landlady from hell. Her stories about post-war life for ordinary people are heart-breaking and appalling. This is proper reportage.

It's the late 1930s, and the newspaper industry is not so much a trade as a profession for gentlemen. Lord Cropper knows so little about how his empire works that he sends the wrong man to a war zone. In Waugh's Scoop, a fine satire on newspaper mayhem, an unknown nobody learns how to be a journalist in north Africa while waiting for the Russians to invade, but he would far rather be writing nature essays. For old hacks with time to kill.

Wigs, flounces, fans, sprites, epic card games, and the calamitous consequences of the cutting of a lock of hair: Alexander Pope's satire on the heroic epic, The Rape of the Lock, is neo-classical fun and games. it's also a sly social commentary on women's lives and the wasted days in the lives of the rich and bored. For those who like to take counsel as well as tea.

One of the great satires of the 1930s, in which a Scotsman wanders through English society after the First World War, and marvels at the English and their ways. A G Macdonell was laughing at his own society too, since he was a journalist and a literary critic in the world he parodied. He is one of the great forgotten comic writers of the interwar years, and England, Their England was his masterpiece. If you enjoy reading about cricket, like to see modernism mocked, and take pleasure in the English gentleman revealed in all his stuffed shirt glory, this book is for you.

The anthropology of the English: what they do when they aren't thinking. A podcast about Kate Fox's brilliant book on the instantly recognisable characteristics of that small island race. If you know even just one English person, or a Brit, this podcast on Watching the English is for you. Class, cars, the English sense of humour, even the passion for queueing: it's all here.