A far more important social signifier than IQ these days is LQ - the number of lavatories you have in your house. Two is the middle-class rock bottom; those with "en suite" bathrooms as well as downstairs "cloakrooms" might clock up three. Those who possess second homes, meanwhile, could be looking at four or even five.

Given this state of affairs, it is fortunate that in our age the literary [...]

Gerard Liger-Belair is a professor of champagne and a leader in the field of bubble study. While this may sound like a euphemism for "alcoholic", it turns out that he is perfectly serious. He is associate professor of physical sciences at the University of Reims and (titter ye not) works as a consultant in the research department of Moet et Chandon. (Well, who doesn't, eh? Especially at this time of [...]

An occupational hazard of being a novelist is fielding queries about how to get published. Now that writing is the new gold rush, seen as the route to instant millions, no week goes by without somebody wanting information, ranging from a mere couple of handy hints to demanding the full name, rank and serial number of my agent and asking me to read their full manuscript into the bargain. Feeling [...]

I went to New York for the first time last year. It wasn't what I expected. But I'm sure the problem wasn't New York; it was me. I was too tired - jaded after a hellish eight months in which I had had a baby, written a novel and then launched it into society.

No doubt I was too old and spoilt as well. I bet the way to [...]

New York City is somewhere I've never been, but I'm finally about to go. In a couple of weeks, I'll be hitting the Big A for the US publication of my new novel, a comic romance set in the south of France. My American editors have been diligent in excising all Briticisms: I've had to suggest US-friendly alternatives to everything from PG Tips to the Renault Saxo, Esther Rantzen to [...]

The way some bookish types talk, you'd think chick lit was some sort of Japanese knotweed of the novel world, choking the literary landscape and preventing choicer, rarer specimens from flowering. So it's good news for us commercial women's fiction writers that we are about to be rescued from the outer darkness and made respectable. A real-life Best of Young British Novelist, Toby Litt, has taken it upon himself to [...]

Now our baby, Andrew, is old enough to be sat, life is beginning to return to normal. Last week, we went out to our first dinner party for what seemed like years. It was held in one of those tall Notting Hill houses with a dining-room in the basement whose table groaned with cut crystal and silver jugs for holding bottles. The talk, too, was textbook perfect: on one side [...]

A grey Derbyshire Monday dawns, drizzly and utterly magnificent. Magnificent because - let joy be unconfined! - I have finally finished my fifth novel, Azur Like It, a romantic comedy set in the south of France and coming to a bookstore near you this August.

It's been a hell of a job, mostly because my first baby, Andrew, was delivered around about the time the novel was supposed to be. [...]

The Tories, Gawd bless'em, have always made better fiction than they have governments. Springing off the top of the wardrobe . . . er, sorry, springing to mind, come Eggwina's literary fantasies about whipped cream, chief whips and strawberries, plus the gloriously gripping House of Cards TV series featuring the fabulously Machiavellian Francis Uruqhart. Labour never lent itself to drama in quite the same way - not evil enough, too [...]

As I was finishing the last chapters of Man and Wife, my spouse of nearly ten years went to the supermarket. When he returned minus the contact lens fluid I had asked for, I flew into a rage that took no account of everything else he had managed to salvage from Somerfield's. Or the fact that he had bothered to go there in the first place. As far as I [...]