Welcome back to The Critic Narrated, where we bring you a selection of articles from our print issues, read aloud by their authors.

In this episode, Robert Thicknesse narrates his Man About Town column from the December/January double issue, Welcome to Londongrad; Alexander Larman laments the myth of the Victorian Christmas for this issue’s sacred cow; and, in his architecture column, Charles Saumarez Smith says that Jonathan Ruffer’s daring philanthropic experiment with Auckland Castle hopes to bring a different kind of regeneration to the north-east.