If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer .I would put my sisters.

She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.