You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.

The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.

My God...it can think.

The last dog I had was an Irish wolfhound - now that is a dog. Rather spoils a person for a lesser canine, that is, anything under a hundredweight.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.