She's a pre-feminist action hero, a serious contender for the hardest secret agent around, and she's a cartoon strip turned into a series of novels. Modesty Blaise predates Lara Croft and Emma Peel, and could beat them hollow: she could probably sort out Bond as well. She's the original fighting machine, performing in breathtakingly exciting capers, dripping with 1960s confidence and down to earth simplicity. For readers who prefer their reading pleasure as a vin ordinaire rather than any nonsense about shaking and stirring. 

Waves, wind, puffins, sheep, tumbled stones, wet grass and rats underfoot in the house when they think they can get away with it. Welcome to the Shiant Isles, which have been sitting between Lewis and mainland Scotland for millennia. The history of these lumps of rock has been put together by Adam Nicolson in Sea-Room, in a tumble of personal story and archaeological finds. Thousands of sea-birds live on the rocks in the summer, no-one lives on the islands in winter except sheep. Fishermen come and go, and the rats keep coming back. The islands mean a great many things to the people who go there, and even more to those who died there. For those who like to read about wild weather and the remoter parts of Britain with their feet dry and the door shut.

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.

One day, the other planets came to earth to deal with the evil that lurked within our own. Lewis finished his science-fiction trilogy with a hard-edged satire on university politics, mixed with spiritual warfare. Mark the half-hearted gives in to political persuasion of the wrong kind. Jane the resolute refuses to believe in God but falls in love instead. Mr Bultitude the bear finds something deliciously hot, bloody and crunchy to eat. Merlin is woken for his Dark Ages magic, which brings chaos to the right places, and evil is crushed. It's stronger stuff than Narnia. For those who want more moral oomph from fantasy fiction.

Cod-fishing, and a summer learning to sail off the Grand Banks, redeems a spoiled brat who fell into the Atlantic off an ocean-going liner at the end of the 19th century. Kipling's story of hard work and the democracy of the sea is a great read about sailing and fishing in the old-fashioned way. It's a record of a lost way of American life, and has a lot to say to modern readers about honesty and the virtues of earning what you receive. Be careful of what's at the end of that fishing line. For those who like fish guts in their tall stories.

A simple life interrupted by a quest to to visit a lonely mountain, and come back again through terrifying dangers into safety. A spiky fantasy about tearing up notices and laughing at committees. Small creatures are found again, unhappy creatures are comforted, and Moominmamma makes pancakes while a comet is about to crash into the earth. The Groke breathes cold into the world. Moomintroll is given a birch-bark schooner on the first day of spring. Tove Jansson's immortal tales about the creatures of Moomin Valley also draw on the dark effects of the Second World War, and give life to Nordic mythology. For those who think adults can read children's books too.

Freya Stark was a great woman traveller and explorer of the Middle East before the Second World War. During the war she worked in Intelligence and propaganda for the British in Cairo. After the war she settled into old age as a grand old lady of exploration, and became a national treasure. But many things had been left out of her own accounts of what she had done, and she left of a lot of bad feeling behind her triumphant exploits in the Middle East. Molly Izzard's biography of Freya Stark digs into her past, and shows us a better and not entirely nicer picture of this remarkable British traveller, that also asks what biography is for, and what we want to remember. For rule-breakers and iconoclasts.

Imagine you're a poor and struggling scriptwriter working in an unheated New York brownstone in the 1940s. You long for the English books you can't get in the New York bookstores, and you start to write to a London antiquarian bookshop. A correspondence develops that shapes your understanding of what it's like to live in England after the war. Years later, you put these letters into a book, it becomes a best-seller, and suddenly everyone wants to know about your life, the life you thought was going to be in the theatre, but which ends up being perfect for a modern novel of letters: Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. For listeners who are always the last to leave a bookshop when it's closing.

Imagine the excitement when the first road is built through the village, when actors come to town, when Miss Girzy dies in a fire with the symbols of her greed clutched in either hand. This podcast raves about John Galt's classic Scottish novel about a village that grows into a town at the turn of the nineteenth century. Annals of the Parish is about instantly recognisable people set against rapidly changing provincial society. For readers who like a good saga.

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.