I've been promising myself a blast of Hockney colour for weeks now and it was actually a mild - dry! - sunny afternoon when I finally made it to his exhibition of 'some very, very, very new paintings' only days before it closes. People were having lunch sitting out in Hanover Square, not quite picnic weather but seizing the moment. Hydrangeas, delphiniums and roses and crumpled gingham tablecloths felt like a hit of Vitamin D and felt wonderfully cheering.

But upstairs in the gallery is the 'Moon Room' of iPad paintings made outside Hockney's studio in Normandy. It was only when I noticed a photo in the catalogue of 88-year-old Hockney, back to the camera, sitting outside on a kitchen chair to 'paint' the night sky that it really brought home to me his unceasing wonderment at everything around him, reflections, silhouetted trees, the moon's corona, clouds; they felt eternal and peaceful - and we surely need that.

Rose Wylie is even older than Hockney but I wasn't bowled over by her exhibition at the Royal Academy; slightly frustrating as everybody else seemed to think it was witty and fun - and I was just thinking, oh, for heaven's sake, give me a paintbox, even I could do that.

But she remembers a bomb landing on her family home during WW2 - which did catch my eye because I've just finished reading A Chelsea Concerto, Frances Faviell's memoir of her time as a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Blitz.

Now, to be honest, Faviell is not a brilliant writer and I don't feel inclined to go on to read any of her novels - the friends and neighbours about whom she writes are cardboard for the most part and don't spring to life on the page. And yet it's riveting, maybe because she writes about a tiny section of London from King's Road to Cheyne Walk and the river, streets I've walked so many times - and you realise how Chelsea was hammered, night after night, by bombers aiming for the power stations and the river bridges. A lull in the bombing brings women out to have their permed, because no-one fancies being hooked up to a waving machine during a raid. Faviell has to measure her hips - 34 inches, an inch to spare on either side - strip to her undies and wriggle into a hole beneath a collapsed house to bring chloroform to a screaming man. One of her jobs was reassembling dismembered body parts for burial. And all this within a few streets of home. Eventually Faviell's own home takes a direct hit. She feels a warm arm around her neck, thinks it her husband - but it's the severed arm of her lovely friend from the flat upstairs, a young woman married only a few days previously and still on her honeymoon. It's a relentless, compelling read - and you do wonder how you would have measured up yourself; what amazing sangfroid and presence of mind and good humour people (mostly) showed. I can't imagine I'd have been much good for anything more than brewing tea with the WVS.

If only it would stop raining, I might have something to write about - but though I tell myself bracingly that I won't dissolve in the downpour, it really doesn't tempt me to venture out, even to sit damply in a cinema. Fortunately the year has kicked off with some very good reading and this gripping biography of George Orwell's invisible first wife Eileen - quite different from any other biography I've ever read - turned out to be an absolute page-turner and I devoured it in just a few days. I'd heard of Sonia Orwell (Blair?), the second wife who was the gatekeeper to Orwell's estate, but hadn't realised that she only married him literally on his deathbed. But Eileen - a shadowy figure never named in her husband's writing, and obliterated by his male biographers - was with Orwell through much of the Spanish Civil war, worked in a dangerous job at political HQ in Barcelona, saved the ms of Homage to Catalonia, probably saved Orwell's sorry life from Stalinist spies... and never gets a mention. Back home in England, she's the one who earned the money, did all the wifework in their freezing cold cottage, despite her debilitating gynae problems, unblocked the squalid, overflowing latrine, typed and edited his work, nursed him when he was sick (and he clearly didn't give a thought to coughing his tubercular guts up over anyone, not even their adopted baby) ... Now I admit I read Orwell at an impressionable age, but I'd always thought of him as one of the Socialist good guys. Turns out that he was a selfish, misogynistic, exploitative, creepy sex-pest and attempted rapist who didn't even try to hide his infidelities from Eileen, who was so self-effacing by the end that, while he gallivanted in Paris doing Important Men's Work, she died on an operating table, aged 39, possibly because the surgery was done on the cheap to save money. Her money! Anna Funder has done a brilliant forensic job piecing together scraps of evidence and giving Eileen a voice. I still feel such rage on her behalf that I'd spit on Orwell's grave. But at risk of victim-blaming, I'm raging at Eileen, too ... you just long for this highly-educated, vibrant woman tell him to f_ off.

And this is the most moving novel I've read in a long time. Although it's fictionalised, it's so rooted in the human tragedy of the Middle East that it feels like a documentary, following generations of a Palestinian family uprooted from their ancestral home in 1948 to face decades of atrocities in the Jenin refugee camp at the hands of the Israelis. I read it shortly after (belatedly) watching the heartbreaking Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land, made by a young Palestinian-Israeli group of directors, about the brutal destruction of Palestinian homes on the West Bank.