If you've ever found yourself drawn to a city the way you might be drawn to a person - aware that you're not quite seeing it whole, that something is being withheld - Keefe's book is the one that makes that intuition feel justified. It follows London not as backdrop but as subject: the layers of money and secrecy and reinvention that have accumulated over centuries and that sit, largely invisible, beneath the surface of ordinary life. What makes it essential is the angle of approach. Keefe doesn't write like a polemicist or a tour guide; he writes like an investigator who is also genuinely in love with the place, and that tension - affection and indictment held simultaneously - gives the book its unusual charge. The prose moves the way good long-form journalism does, pulling you through complicated material without ever making you feel managed, and he has a gift for finding the single human detail that unlocks something much larger. It is also, in its way, a book about what cities decide to forget and what they decide to remember, and about who gets to make that choice. Keefe is known for patient, obsessive reporting - Say Nothing, Empire of Pain - and here he applies the same methodology to a place rather than a crime or a family, which turns out to be exactly the right instrument for the job. What comes out feels less like a book about London than a book that London has been quietly requiring someone to write for a long time.

By May, forced rhubarb is having its final moment in the spotlight, and this cake feels like the perfect send-off. The sharp, blush-pink fruit softens into the sponge as it bakes, creating pockets of sweetness and tartness that taste unmistakably like the shift from spring into summer. There's something wonderfully nostalgic about the rhubarb-and-custard pairing, but the Earl Grey custard gives it a fresher, more grown-up twist — floral, fragrant, and ideal for long afternoons when tea somehow turns into cake and another cup. It's the kind of bake that belongs on a garden table, served in thick slices and eaten slowly in the sunshine while the season changes around you.

There are houses that aspire, and then there is Eltham Palace - a building that simply is, with the unruffled confidence of something that has always known exactly what it wants to be. Commissioned by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld in the 1930s and grafted onto the ruins of a medieval great hall with a kind of inspired audacity, it remains one of England's most singular interiors: a meeting of Art Deco at its most assured - lacquered surfaces, curved walls, inlaid veneers - with the quiet heft of genuine history beneath its feet. The entrance hall alone, with its aluminium-leafed dome and gallery of silvered light, is worth the journey south of the river. Come for the architecture, stay for the garden (underrated, generously planted), and leave with the particular satisfaction of having visited somewhere that rewards a discerning eye.

Boards of Canada have always made music that sounds like memory - not your own, specifically, but someone's: sun-faded, slightly worn at the edges, carrying the particular warmth of something half-forgotten. Inferno, the Scottish duo's long-awaited return, is more of the same in the best possible sense. The degraded textures, the looping melodic figures, the sense that every sound has been left out in the light too long - it's all here, and it still works like almost nothing else does. This is not an album that makes a case for itself upfront. It asks for a Sunday afternoon, a decent pair of headphones, and a window with something worth looking at through it. Give it that, and it's quietly, unhurriedly brilliant. The kind of record you'll put on for a specific mood and find yourself still listening to an hour later, unsure quite when it stopped being background and started being the whole point.

Some places earn their setting. Luna - tucked into the cobbled streets of historic Shad Thames - is one of them: a wine bar, bottle shop and restaurant that manages to feel like a local even if you've never been before. Pop in for a few glasses from a list that leans natural and interesting without requiring homework, stay for small plates that hold their own rather than playing second fiddle, or make a proper evening of it and book for dinner. It works just as well for a first date as it does for a long catch-up with your closest friends, the conversation flowing as easily as the wine. The kind of neighbourhood spot that every neighbourhood deserves - and that this particular stretch of cobblestones wears very well.

For the couple who already have everything and need nothing - except, it turns out, this. The Riera wine glasses from Los Vasos de Agua Clara are the kind of wedding gift that gets unpacked, immediately placed on the table, and never put away: six hand-painted stems in peony and raspberry, made by two friends in Spain, each one ringed with saturated colour in a way that manages to feel simultaneously celebratory and quietly sophisticated. They're the glasses that make an ordinary Tuesday evening feel like it was dressed for the occasion - and for a newly married couple setting up a home together, that's exactly the kind of everyday joy worth giving.