Visitors to Siena are told about two major historical catastrophes that determined the future of the city: the Black Death in 1348 and the final capitulation to Florence in 1555. Such events manifest themselves respectively in the spectacularly incomplete Duomo and in the marked reduction of buildings and art created after the sixteenth century, when the city’s fortunes declined under submission to its northern neighbour. The city’s population, estimated at fifty thousand in the early fourteenth century, is not much more than that now. It remains to be seen if the crisis faced by the proud, ancient, and reckless Sienese Monte dei Paschi bank (established in 1472) in the wake of the GFC will have a similarly long-term impact. Apart from its fiscal activities, the bank’s foundation has underwritten the city’s cultural activities, the museums, the university, sports teams, the Palio. If the two historical disasters are anything to go by, it is the lack of progress following them that has ensured the survival of this most beautiful of Tuscan hill towns and its treasury of art and architecture.

Jane Tylus has not produced a history or travel guide to Siena – there are plenty of those – but, as her subtitle indicates, something more intimate and personal. Her narrative mentions all the main architectural sights, works of art and cultural activities, but interweaves these with digressions that jump back and forth from the past to the present, from the core of the city to its surroundings, from its very foundations to the pinnacles of its towers. In this she mirrors in her text the rich, complex, undulating, and labyrinthine city to which she keeps returning. She shares her experiences and discoveries, taking the reader on her journey. The narrative is wound around five themes, each of which is most appropriate to Siena and each of which could warrant a book: ‘Terra and Acqua’, ‘Pilgrims’, ‘Money’, ‘Neighbourhoods’, and ‘Saints’.

In 1977, before personal computers and the Internet, Umberto Eco published How to Write a Thesis. It has remained in print ever since, but only now is it available in English. The book hasn’t been updated and makes no concessions to technological change. Space is devoted to card indexes and manual typewriters, offering alternatives if the student owns an IBM Selectric. Eco advises choosing a thesis topic for which ‘sources [are] locally available and easily accessible’.

Much of this has limited value for the twenty-first-century student. Also, Eco is giving advice for the Italian laurea thesis, which in scope is quite unlike the American or Australian PhD. Nevertheless, it is still true that primary and secondary sources must be accessible, even if they are not held locally, and Eco’s guidelines for manageable thesis topics remain sensible, if sometimes rather comical. He even explains to the time-poor student how to plagiarise a thesis from a sufficiently distant university to avoid detection, while carefully pointing out that the ‘advice we have just offered [is] illegal’.

By some accounts, it was love at first sight. When Kenneth Clark, recently graduated with a 2A from Oxford, lunched with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in September 1925, BB impulsively invited him to collaborate on the revised edition of his chef d’oeuvre: The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticized and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné.

Forty years on, in the first volume of his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, Clark remembered that first meeting rather differently. An awkward circle of guests stood around awaiting the entrance of the Great Man. Conversation over lunch was mainly in Italian, which Clark didn’t speak. After lunch in the fragrance of the limonaia, Berenson continued to talk for a further forty minutes. ‘By this time I had taken the strongest possible dislike to him. His appearance, and what little I had understood of his conversation, exuded arrogance of a kind most Anglo-Saxons try to conceal.’

The opportunity, however, was too good to be missed and Clark joined the I Tatti circle. The engagement proved to be short-lived. In 1927 Clark married Jane Martin, a stylish Oxford beauty, and the court of Settignano felt ‘betrayed’. Berenson behaved badly to Jane when she came to I Tatti, talking across her at lunch in Italian and German, neither of which she understood. Jane ‘formed a dislike of Mr Berenson she never entirely lost’, as her husband dispassionately noted in his autobiography. You would never know it from her gushing letters included in this volume. She loved dropping names to entertain the old boy’s social vanity:

Thursday last week was a beano for the Clark family as the King and Queen came to lunch. He is very hard to rouse but she is charming. They came informally, no people in waiting or even morning coats for the men … the Queen enjoyed the pictures especially oddly enough the late blue Cezanne’s in my room. She had never seen a Cezanne before and thought them v.g. … The King gazed at the large early Matisse but was too polite to say anything. He would not be interesting unless he were king. The following day lunch at No. 10 seemed a great comedown!

The age of apex narcissism has opened the publishing floodgates to myopic and often unnecessary confessionals, personal tales of shame and struggle that, in the past, would more likely have been recounted to a priest or therapist. The memoir genre is at its peak, and the descent may be swift and brutal.

Miles Franklin-winning author Evie Wyld cleverly subverts the genre with her graphic memoir, Everything Is Teeth, in collaboration with illustrator Joe Sumner, a London-based model maker, who enters the publishing fray for the first time here. More akin to a visual short story, this oversized hardback is a delight both to hold and read.

What was it like for Wyld growing up in coastal New South Wales? The answer is simple, funny, and panders deliciously to how the British perceive Australia as being infested with sharks. As a child, Wyld was obsessed with them. She glimpsed fins where there were none, revelled in survivor stories, and fished for the beasts with her family.