A strange business, being kept from sleeping because of a news story. The news is essentially information you’re told about people you don’t know. And yet, the other night, there I was, unable to sleep because all I could think about was those photographs of Aylan, a three year-old boy who died in the sea and washed up on a beach.

Has any other novelist been as richly served by cinema as Patricia Highsmith? Strangers on a Train, Plein Soleil, The American Friend, The Talented Mr Ripley, The Two Faces of January. Not all masterpieces, but still a pretty good record by my reckoning.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,

I stand and look at them long and long.

Writer's writer is one of those phrases which, whilst intended as a compliment, has a faintly off-putting ring, implying boring elegiac tales in which nothing happens. Not so with Aickman.

Blood Relatives by Stevan Alcock