From public bar to cocktail bar: books for the discerning drinker

One of the joys of getting older is the appreciation of the solitary pint. But what to do as you sip your hard-earned beer? Usually after a suitable period of contemplation I’ll start fiddling with my phone. Not Adrian Tierney-Jones; he writes books, and his latest, A Pub for All Seasons (Headline, £20), is a poetic meditation on the public house, its history and place in our culture with some memoir deftly thrown in. Most of all it’s an appreciation of what makes a pub great: the layers accumulated by decades – centuries, sometimes – of human interaction. ‘The perfect pub,’ he writes, ‘is a kind of metaphysical palimpsest which we should try to imagine as a constantly evolving space.’ This is why it’s so sad when a new landlord comes in, strips away the clutter and replaces it with cushions that say ‘Love’ on them.

It’s from the public bar to the wine bar with Dan Keeling’s Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? (Quadrille, £30).