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BIG BEN is set to fall silent for four years to allow for repairs to the Elizabeth Tower, a rare interruption in more than a century and a half. Since it first rang out in 1859 the clock has come to symbolise London and its resilience. Through good times and bad it has told the hours and the quarters. But this impression of monumental stability belies a history of setbacks, controversy and personal tragedy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FROM the desk where I'm writing I can see Lakanal House, a Fifties tower block on the Sceaux Gardens Estate in Camberwell. On the afternoon of July 3, 2009, as I was sitting here, I heard shouting, looked up and saw black smoke coming from a lower storey. Within an hour what the London Fire Brigade described as "one of the most significant fires in some time" had taken hold. Six people — three children and three adults — died. This February Southwark council pleaded guilty to four counts of breaking fire regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

YOU can tell a lot about a city from its skyline. A W N Pugin, who gave London one of its greatest landmarks, Big Ben, was critical of the cities of his own day for their brutality. In prints that became famous he compared the spires and towers of a medieval town with the factory chimneys and workhouses that dotted the horizon by the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PAPER GARDEN: MRS DELANY {BEGINS HER LIFE'S WORK} AT 72 by Molly Peacock (Bloomsbury, £20) ROSEMARY HILL A WOMAN'S scope was limited in the 18th century. All the professions and most of the arts were closed to her. Acceptable accomplishments were largely limited to drawing, sewing, music and handicrafts that came and went with fashion. It is tempting to see in that frenetic outpouring of netting, knotting and tatting the sublimation of many higher intellectual ambitions. Yet to a woman of means, possessed of what Jane Austen characterised as "a mind lively and at ease", there were opportunities to be made and taken. Mary Delany made impressive use of hers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES: A HIDDEN INHERITANCE by Edmund de Waal (Chatto, £16.99) PART treasure hunt, part family saga, Edmund de Waal's richly original memoir spans nearly two centuries and covers half the world. His pursuit of his Russian-Jewish ancestors, the Ephrussis, begins and ends in Japan, passing in between across Europe from Odessa to Tunbridge Wells. Having made their fortune in the grain trade in the mid-19th century, the Ephrussis enjoyed spectacular wealth and prominence in Paris and Vienna until the rise of fascism scattered them. They lost almost everything, except for a collection of Japanese netsuke, exquisite miniature carvings, which de Waal later inherited. One of them gives his book its title and it is through the story of the netsuke that the rise and fall of the Ephrussis unfolds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LONDON'S streets are full of ghosts, traces of the famous and notorious who have passed through the capital, not so much a city, Disraeli called it, as a nation, with "a roost for every bird". [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]