L If they’re ever looking to recruit spies, forget handsome, fit, blue-eyed Bonds. Forget gym-buffed Daniel, impossibly good-looking Tom and danger magnet Matt. Look instead for a middle-aged woman in

Her lifelong passion for dogs and horses has shaped her career and lifestyle – and now it has led to her first grown-up novel. So what else lies ahead for the unstoppable Clare Balding?

The folk horror novelist still finds this writing business “excruciating”…

Life has a bad habit of mirroring art. Sometimes, this can be in a deeply sad way. A while after I wrote about the assumption of guilt in a traumatised young woman with poor social skills, I watched a

TV presenter Steph McGovern, 43, on motherhood and Middlesbrough

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was my recent holiday read, and I loved it. It tells the story of lonely widow Tova, whose teenage son vanished 30 years ago. She works at a small aquari