We see Zaha Hadid attempting to reduce her vaulting ambition to 1:12 (it wasn't very successful), and hold our breath as a micro-miniaturist describes replicating the Mona Lisa in less than a square millimetre (he used an eyelash for a paintbrush). It was so beautiful that actually playing with it was out of the question. Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton and Siegfried Sassoon were among those who provided original work for the tiny, readable books Gustav Holst wrote a score. He takes the reader from Ancient Egyptian shabtis, miniaturised retainers who accompanied their employers into the realms of death, to the doll's house Edwin Lutyens made for Queen Mary, in which every aspect, from the books to the telephone to the toilet, was made by the leading practitioner in the field: clocks by Cartier, cricket bat by John Wisden & Co, wine from Berry Bros, the art by Paul Nash and Arthur Rackham. From the first person who climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower and was amazed to see Paris receding and Parisians becoming ants from the moment, in fact, 40,000 years ago, when Venus figurines, a few centimetres tall, were first carved, we have been in thrall, Garfield argues, to the clarifying effects of scale. (He is robustly dismissive of the soulless greatest-hits parade of, for instance, Mini-Europe in Belgium.) The hint of cattiness on the faces of the pub regulars in Bekonscot, the hopeful cricketer on the village green: there is a sense of unease, and of a clear point of view. According to Garfield, what makes Bekonscot attractive is not only its size - a scale of 1:12 and 1:32, across an area of 40,000 sq ft - but its idiosyncrasy.

People were so keen that by the end of last year more than 15.4 million people had visited it. He built a village around his railway, and people to live in it impressed friends suggested the public might pay. So the husband, accountant Roland Robert Callingham, took over the garden. Model villages, murder and a microscopic Mona Lisa in a polished celebration of the small-scale 'No one is quite sure how Bekonscot, a model village in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, came to be,' Simon Garfield writes, but 'the most satisfying story' begins in 1927 'with a housebound miniature railway that grew so big that a wife reached for the rolling pin: either it went or she did'.

Private Battles by Simon Garfield