THREE HOUSES, MANY LIVES by Gillian Tindall (Chatto & Windus, £18.99)

Every now and then a book comes along that is somehow different from the rest: idiosyncratic; weirdly constructed; thought-provoking. This is just such a book. Tindall has the ability to reveal ghosts of the past that still exist in the present; in particular in old houses. One of the three she examines in detail is the Old Vicarage in Taynton, near Burford; an almost eerily pretty Oxfordshire Cotswold village which, some might say, has in recent years been polished and manicured to within an inch of its life. She shows that it is older than it looks and casts a sympathetic eye on its occupants over the ages.

Now a valuable period residence, the Old Vicarage was sold for £3,000 in 1957 by Gloucester diocese (into which it fell for reasons that date back to the 15th century). Then, 12 years later and still comparatively ramshackle, it was sold to Tyndall’s cousins, the Milners, who sold again in 2007 — this time for a price unrevealed in the book. During those 39 years she got to know and love it well.

But this is not another account of rocketing house prices since the war, or even about the social changes those price hikes have caused. Instead it is about something much more subtle, namely: a spirit of place, or, more materially, the physical signs in old houses that show how they have managed to survive such temporary social changes. Despite its occasional other-world tone, the book is an extraordinarily well-researched and factual history of three houses: the dreary Sussex boarding school she attended during the fifties, once the home of an illegitimate son of Lord Chesterfield; a building in Seven Sisters Road, London, that she first saw when reconnoitering the area in which an early boyfriend lived (without the boyfriend’s knowledge); and of course the Old Vicarage.

An extra bonus is the insight it affords into the life of the author who, the reader gathers, is a “baby boomer” born after, or perhaps near the end of, the Second World War. Her eye for well-remembered detail is delightful.