I’ve always been a fan of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer, a casual, smart, funny enterprise that has even led me to some books that I’ve enjoyed. In 2008, Hornby left the column behind, but now he’s back: “It’s never easy, returning home after failing to make one’s way out in the world. When I left these pages in 2008, it was very much in the spirit of ‘Good-bye, nerdy losers! I’m not wasting any more time ploughing through books on your behalf! I have things to do, places to go, people to see!’ Ah, well.”

This is a welcome development. Only the first three paragraphs are available online, so I need to pick up the magazine, because one of the books Hornby’s been reading is one that I just started:

David Kynaston’s superlative Austerity Britain is more than six hundred pages long and deals with just six years, 1945–51, in the life of my country. The second volume in the series, Family Britain, 1951–57, has already been published, so I plan to move on to that next; Kynaston is going to take us through to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and I’m warning you now that I plan to read every single word, and write about them in great detail in this column.