There are not many authors whom readers wish had written more, rather than fewer, novels but Eva Ibbotson is among them. Like Jane Austen, she wrote just six completed books: A Countess Below Stairs (1981), Magic Flutes (1982), Company of...

“There is no money, and the Bredins can’t afford to divorce.” The first four words opening my new novel, The Lie of the Land, come from a famous note left by a Minister in the last Labour government to the...