The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh
Bloomsbury, £20 Buy the book

Waugh has a track record of writing about complicated, difficult families: in this case, the Wittgensteins (very rich, musically talented, serially suicidal), of which the most famous member was Ludwig, the philosopher. Waugh opts to tell the Wittgenstein story through Ludwig's brother Paul, a concert pianist (notable because he used only his left hand) who died in 1961. The fall of the family through war (internal and external) and personal eccentricity is a grand theme: Visconti would have loved it.

Remember Remember: Learn the Stuff You Never Thought You Could by Ed Cooke
Viking, £12.99 Buy the book

Memory techniques are “ridiculously underused”, says Cooke, Mr Memory columnist for The Times who suggests that we tell ourselves stories to help us to remember strings of names in sequence. For this book he has written four narratives, heavy on imagery, allusions, synonyms and sound-alike words that include the names of every British prime minister and monarch, US president and every country in Europe. The same principle can perhaps be more usefully applied to your shopping list. Give up writing things down.

Ruth Belville: The Greenwich Time Lady by David Rooney
NMM, £12.99 Buy the book

From 1836 to 1940, the Belville family sold time to Londoners. With Arnold, an 18th-century pocket watch that was regularly checked to an accuracy of one tenth of a second, first Maria and then her daughter Ruth made the rounds of subscribers who correlated their own clocks to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) with Arnold's amazingly accurate timekeeping. Rooney tells a story that Dickens would have loved, lively with the oddity of human characters making a living from time, laced with arcane lore of London and loaded with the history of the Royal Observatory and GMT.

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