Deborah Friedell

On Saturday I sat the ‘Life in the UK’ test, a requirement for foreign nationals who want to apply for citizenship or permanent leave to remain. My nearest test centre was in a dingy basement off the Essex Road. The fluorescent lights weren't doing very well. The invigilators were stone-faced, a bit rude. I'd been forbidden from talking to or looking at my fellow immigrants, about 20 people, mostly men. While waiting for the test to begin all I had to look at was the cover of my American passport.

Georgette Heyer's advice for novelists, from Jennifer Kloester's forthcoming biography: 1. Induce your publisher to hand over at once a sum of money grossly in excess of what the book is likely to be worth to him. This gives one a certain amount of incentive to write the thing, and may be achieved by various methods, the most highly recommended being what may be termed as The Little Woman Act. 2. Think out a snappy title. This deceives the publisher into thinking (a) that he is getting the Book of the Year; and (b) that you have the whole plot already mapped out. The only drawback lies in the fact that having announced a title you will be slightly handicapped when it comes to hanging some kind of story on to it.

One of the more unlikely heroes in English literature is Dickens’s rent collector Pancks, a ‘dry, uncomfortable, dreary Plodder and Grubber’, who shows a ‘sagacity that nothing could baffle, and a patience and secrecy that nothing could tire' to determine that the Dorrits languishing in debtors’ prison are heirs to a fortune that ‘had long lain unknown of, unclaimed and accumulating’. No such sagacity would now be required, at least in America.

'As if Joyce had sat down and written Sin City.' (Cape) 'If Fred Astaire had been a novelist he'd have been Paul Bailey.' (Bloomsbury) 'An homage to Miss Marple – or Miss Marple as a badass, paralysed Norwegian lesbian detective.' (Corvus)