At home: a short history of private life / Bill Bryson.

Travel writer and memoirist Bill Bryson starts at home – his house, a Victorian rectory in Norfolk England built in 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace Exhibition.  As he explores each room, Bryson expounds on the social history of household objects with digressions to significant events and people associated with them. A pleasant ramble, though I would not always recommend this book as a meal time companion.  Here’s what Bryson has to say::  

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What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens knew: from fox hunting to whist: the facts of daily life in nineteenth-century England / Daniel Pool.