Alongside a hell of a lot of books about cookery, my lovely girlfriend’s bookshelves are mainly filled with novels by two venerable English Dames (not in the Phillip Marlow sense) - Agatha Christie and Iris Murdoch. So far this year, I’ve mainly been alternating their books on the way to and from work, and my recent reading has gone: The Sea, the Sea - After The Funeral - The Word Child - Five Little Pigs - The Good Apprentice - Sparkling Cyanide. And you know what, I’m starting to think that despite what I would have assumed, the books by Iris are the more predictable - all that male intellectual angst!

The ones I have enjoyed - The Unicorn, the Sea, the Sea The Good Apprentice - have tended to be the more mystical, or rather the more supernatural - I far prefer Murdoch writing about elemental subjects than constant blah blah blah existential anguish. And as for Agatha (I love her quote that the best thing about being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get, the more interested they are in you) the books are great, they really are. And much more diverse in setting and scope than I would have thought. The butler doesn’t always do it. In fact, I don’t think the butler has done it yet.