A child was a brief and blissful interlude of responsibility, not a thing to be owned.

Perhaps,” he continued, “this capacity for evil is in all of us, then, and it’s largely down to fortune whether we encounter the circumstance that breathes life into it or not. Just as it’s luck that determines when or if that faulty gene breaks and gives you cancer or Marfan or the physique of an Olympian.

His dad, dying in the hospital, had said something about pain. It stuck to you like flour. You thought you could wash it all away, out of your clothes, out of your hair. But some stray grain always persisted, slyly avoiding your well-meant attentions and the drugs the doctors had. Life was like that. The only thing to do, he said, was your best.

The hearing test, which involved sitting in a quiet room listening to noises of various pitch played through headphones, confirmed the worst. I had no hearing in my left ear whatsoever.

In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.

If you look at the play very closely, this is a thirdhand report of what a wonderful hero Macbeth is for saving Scotland. And in the next scene, he's planning to murder Duncan, and you never really know why or what's behind Macbeth.

In Filey, you eat early to prepare for the highlight of the evening: social intercourse of a kind one thought relegated to Stanley Holloway monologues.

The bronze dwarfs give you the first clue that Wroclaw is no ordinary city. They lurk all over the place, carousing outside pubs, snoring at the doors of hotels, peeking out from behind the bars of the old city jail.

Scarborough never really began to live until the summer of 1964 when the Beatles played the Futurist Theatre, and no one in the audience, least of all me, heard anything but the screaming.

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.