Margaret Leigh

Mrs G has a fine eye for art. On the white wall, the academic realism of Barrington Watson hangs beside the less measured but more joyful brushstrokes of Ken Spencer and the religious iconography of Oswald Watson. She even has an original Carl Abrahams and two drawings by Edna Manley.

We sat at the table and started eating as fast as the boys racing makeshift bum boards down the road during the Tablas de San Andrés festival. Except there was nothing at the bottom to cushion our fall.

‘Thomas, I try and try to be good but I don’t know how. I want to be free to think my own thoughts about what is good, and what is bad – sometimes I wonder what it would be like to wake up on a Sunday morning and have it be just another day – to wear make-up, and jeans, and go to parties, and not think every minute that I’ve made God angry, or been

‘Apple’ was a generic word for fruit in ancient Greece and Rome, and the golden apples were originally depicted as quinces, as they were in the frieze in the Temple of Zeus,

There are saga descriptions of the interred dead ‘living’ in their graves, including a wonderful episode from the Saga of Burnt Njál where men walk past a burial mound at night only to find it somehow open, and inside sits its dead occupant happily singing and looking at the moon.

He climbs upward, reluctantly. Lethargically. Only motivated by the off chance of a cigarette and some decent Scotch. Maybe he’ll have time to visit a day spa, this time. Get some sort of deep pore cleanse. Sleeping in the London soil does nothing for his complexion. He wishes he could stay dead for longer stretches of time without anybody botherin

Odin’s hall, and Freyja’s, hold “all men who have fallen in battle since the beginning”, but they will be too few “when the wolf comes”, as Fenrir inevitably will at the Ragnarök. Kings and their retinues are therefore especially welcome, with the Valkyries serving wine for such a royal entrance.

—Your pace is a big part of how you engage an audience. It’s as much about how fast or slow you choose to go as it is about how much you are listening to them, watching them and registering if they are following you.

The Christmas Egg consolidated Kelly’s developing reputation as a quirky, intelligent crime novelist, but she was never interested in following fashion or working to a template. Later, in an excess of modesty that seems typical of her, she would describe the three Nightingale books as “sins of my youth”.