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The crime novelist Donna Leon is best known for her series of novels set in Venice starring her hero Commissario Brunetti. Donna has also written ‘The Gondola’ (Heinemann) a study of Venice’s trademark boats and their place in culture. She shares her pleasure in ‘barcaroles’, the traditional songs of the Gondoliers. Her new Brunetti book ‘By its Cover’, which starts with an argument between gondoliers has just been published (Heinemann).ÌýÌýÌý

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VeniceÌýand its waterways also inspired Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta ‘The Gondoliers’. The Opera Della Luna company reimagines Gilbert and Sullivan, going back to the original texts and asking what they mean to a contemporary audience. (names ) perform ‘We are the Gondoliers’ from their new production.

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Poet and novelist Patrick McGuiness teaches at the University of Oxford. His new book is ‘Other People’s Countries’ (Jonathan Cape) a meditation on memory, and a childhood that felt ‘incubated’ rather than ‘lived’ in Belgium. Patrick discusses the problems of trying to capture memory in language, and asks what language does to memory itself.

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The property expert Henry Pryor delves into the language of estate agents, using a famous fictional house to illustrate the changing trends in property descriptions over the past few decades, as ‘Pied-a-Terre’ gives way to ‘architect designed’.

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Writer and performer Nathan Penlington has long held an obsession with the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ stories which had their heyday in the1980’s, and opened up new possibilities for storytelling. Nathan examines their appeal, and his feeling of kinship with another fan which has led to a memoir ‘The Boy in the Book’(Headline) and a live show ‘Choose Your Own Documentary’.

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