An Aunt is a safe haven for a child. Someone who will keep your secrets and is always on your side.

At the end of the day, that's what a family is - a group of different people who accept each other.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.

Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.