Lansdowne: The Stadium, The Matches, The Greatest Days By Gerard Siggins & Malachy Clerkin, O'Brien Press, €17.99, 350pps

WE WILL always remember it, primarily, as a wonderfully atmospheric rugby stadium. Primarily, that is, if we exclude the early efforts to introduce cricket (Lansdowne CC, never quite top drawer), archery, athletics, croquet, hurling (a still-birth, and in a book full of surprises, we discover that Unionist leader Edward Carson was a big hurling fan), baseball (never got off the ground), American Football and of course Association Football.

Football was even more a working-class game back then, and in time would challenge and change Lansdowne club rules excluding 'labourers', and general trade.

As far back as 1900, an attendance of 8,000 saw England beat Ireland 2-0. Twenty-seven years later, Italy took on an Irish team in what was reported to have been a rough house. An old friend of mine, Sacky Glen – a 'labourer' with the Irish Times – was singled out for "displaying a crude idea of half-back play." Mind you, he was a bit rough.

The book is lavishly illustrated – there is one picture of Roy Keane taking out Marc Overmars - coupled with some very fine writing – "...In time the new stadium will tell its own stories and host its own great days. For now, however, you will have to make do with these. Enjoy." And you will, reader, you will.

Jezebel By Irène Némirovsky, Vintage £8.99

The old-fashioned, theatrical style of this tragic romance does not suit today's more casual exposing of emotions, and makes it feel like an old film: out of date but full of curiosity value.

Yet Irene Nemirovsky's tale of a woman on trial for shooting her young lover rings more contemporary bells than we might at first think. Gladys Eysenach is a beautiful woman whose life has been dominated by her appearance. Her greatest task, as she grows older, is to hold on to that beauty, and to this end she lies about her age and the age of her daughter, spends hours on elaborate skin-treating regimes, and delights in attracting men to whom she never has any intention of acquiescing. She's a vamp, a femme fatale and dangerously self-centred, but also vulnerable and lonely.

Nemirovsky shows no love for her fellow women in this often bitchy tale which, when first published in 1936, was thought to have been a damning portrayal of her own mother.

Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms By John Ayto, Oxford £9.99, 408pp

This fascinating book reminds us how much of English is a sort of code. Ayto points out, "There is no way you could guess that 'kick the bucket' means 'to die'."

A chilling derivation is the "pail on which a person committing suicide might stand". This is no relation to the jollier "hand in your dinner pail" (much used by PG Wodehouse).

Ayto has "laugh like a drain" and "laugh all the way to the bank", but not Liberace's inversion (on an abusive article): "I'll cry all the way to the bank".

Among the joys of this work are Ayto's drolly sober definitions: so, "to sweat blood" means "make an extraordinarily strenuous effort to do something". If you want to know who Sweet Fanny Adams was (victim of an 1867 murder), this book is the bee's knees.

Additional reviews by Lesley McDowell and Christopher Hirst