Kevin Volans is celebrating his half-century on 14 July, although the real date is 12 days later. Highly esteemed back home and known here for his sensational Romeo and Juliet (which is performed by the Kirov Ballet), in Paganini he presents an evocation of the violinist’s life which is exhausting in its whirl of pirouettes, muses (led by the ethereal Nina Kaptsova) and tormentors.Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells to 31 July Booking: 0171 863 8000. The late Leonid Lavrovsky was the choreographer who created it in 1960 to Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Without the darkly dashing Nikolai Tsiskaridze in the title part of Paganini, added as an opener to Giselle, the banal and dated choreography would have been less bearable.

Sergei Filine as Albrecht, equally good-looking, was a polished partner and stylish, if not stunningly virtuosic, dancer.The Bolshoi, like the Paris Opera Ballet, is exceptional for its array of men, where other companies have problems finding men who can dance, let alone look good. The Bolshoi’s Giselle, Svetlana Lunkina, had an elfin face, fine- drawn physique, and suitably high-strung air. Her dancing was as light and perfect as possible, but she is just not a phenomenon as Guillem is. And then there is Guillem’s Giselle, the horrifying stillness of her mad scene contrasting with her former vitality, where joy of life is synonymous with joy of dancing.Guillem dances so effortlessly, so naturally, her body is so exactly responsive she can produce inflections and subtleties of movement that no one else can There is simply far more in an enchainement danced by her. Hilaire, impossibly handsome, strikes just the right note of autocratic elegance and infatuation: how well-observed, for example, when Berthe mimes her warning about Wilis, for him to be more occupied with the warmth of Giselle’s skin and only half able to conceal his contempt at Berthe’s uneducated superstition. They are a long-standing stage partnership and interact wonderfully. They have pondered and extended their roles, introducing new touches so that suddenly Giselle and Albrecht slough off the staleness of accumulated interpretations to appear fresh and alive again.

Is it that Russian ballet has forgotten how to do mime? Or is it that British training has, over the decades, refined it to a vividly explicit and dramatic medium?Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hilaire, guesting with the Royal Ballet, are quintessential French dancers, but were also superlative in their mime and naturalistic acting. It is not just that there is less of it, but that it comes across asartificial and vague. Hands stroke the air in generalised wavings and flourishes that could mean anything; detail and precision are absent. But what always disappoints with Russians is the way they perform mime.

HERE IS the conundrum at the heart of Mr Blair’s Britain: if the Prime Minister and his approach to Government are so popular, why is he so anxious? The economy appears to have skirted recession, and unemployment remains blissfully low by European standards. And when all the glossy, gleaming, glamorous heroines are found to have feet of clay, and you’re stuck with ordinary women instead, then you realise that it’s no good putting your faith in anyone else to change your life.. They come to us with a sharp eye for whatever is absurd and amusing about themselves and their environment.And isn’t it, in some ways, rather nice if women have started to feel that they don’t really need those larger-than-life heroines so much any more? Because it’s only when people are feeling pretty confident that they’re able to laugh at themselves. I think I want freedom.”None of them have it all, but all of them have something And all of them are good at laughing at themselves. Melissa Bank’s Jane Rosenal knows that she’ll never be a Manhattan powermonger, but she finds out that “I didn’t think I wanted power. Bridget Jones still knows that her girlfriends will always be around to have fun with if her boyfriend of the moment runs out.

But they still have a good idea of where they’re going.Ally McBeal still knows that she’s one of the best lawyers in her circle, and can always talk herself out of a tight corner in court. They aren’t perfect, but we needn’t see them simply as wholly negative, part of some kind of backlash against growing female power. Yes, these women might think too much about their bodies and their boyfriends and they might both laugh and cry rather uncontrollably. You can think that Madonna as fortysomething mother or Posh Spice as pretty bride isn’t quite the same as the kick-ass girls they used to be. You might be waiting for some bigger and better heroines to come along. In fact, they’re still around if you want to go looking for them, and no doubt one day they will take centre stage once again.But in the meantime, you can see that the way that these anti-heroines behave is rather endearing.

I waltzed into one of my favourite shops, knowing my prices inside out having diligently researched the issue on the Internet. So all I needed to test was the tactile experience of the keyboards, multimedia quality, weights and quality of the design.The Portege failed the keyboard tests, as the keyboard was slippery and would cause a significant decrease of my typing speed. But I kept looking at News reviews of the latest portables, and settled on four candidates. First, the Toshiba Portege 3020CT, which would be the natural upgrade path from my current notebook. If you are a multimedia or DVD freak, issues such as the position of the speakers matter, as often the speakers are hidden in the keyboard, limiting the power of the sound.All in all then, lots of variables and not an easy buying process. My old Toshiba, which takes up more space than a small car, expired after just an hour: the time had come to bite the bullet and update my kit.Feeding frequency is important, as the most powerful box in the world is pretty much useless without a significant battery charge.

Since you will be stroking it a lot, keyboard quality, the depth of tactile feedback and the size of the keys are critical to your speed of work and ease of use. However, with the new wave of ultralight notebooks, portable computers are moving into a completely new era.
This was sharply brought to my attention during a recent flight from LA, when a kid next to me played games for over six hours on his tiny Sony Vaio, and then nonchalantly slipped it into a mini-knapsack. Laptops and mobile computing have been growing furiously over the last two years. I have been a laptop user for over five years now, and still warmly remember the clunky Toshibas and lovely but back-breaking IBM Thinkpads.

That means having to conquer foreign phone sockets, temperamental electricity systems and dubious roaming agreements from my ISP. COME THE summer holidays, I always get in a panic over delivering this column from various exotic parts of the world. A lucrative business doesn’t usually get made into a lucrative website without radical re-thinking and fundamental transformation.Maybe a great online look and a great on-shelf look are fundamentally different challenges as well.Jason Cranford Teague is the author of `DHTML For the World Wide Web’.If you have questions, you can find an archive of his column at Webbed Environments ( www.webbedenvironemtns ) or e-mail him at jason webbedenvironemts .. This is just one example of how the world doesn’t always translate obviously from one medium to another.Great product literature can’t become a great online resource with just a scanner and Adobe Acrobat. So an easy first step I’d say is to pick the colours on the monitor you use most.Then I think it is a good idea to try to see what everyone will be seeing. At i-on ( www.i-on ), one of the top Web-design firms in south Florida, they have a farm of monitors of all stripe for solving this very dilemma.Most of all I recommend not getting your expectations up too high about screen and print matching.

The problem is, of course, that I can’t predict the exact outcome on the visitor’s machine. Any recommendations on how to make the colours as close as possible to their real-life counterparts?BS It is a real problem as the line begins to blur between reality and cyberspace, isn’t it? I wonder when we’ll hear more of the opposite problem: a company started on the web wants stationery or packaging to match its web colours and can’t seem to get it right with inks.The wondrous human eye can compensate for a lot and I tend to think people get used to their own monitors. What I intended to do with my browser-safe colour palette poster is to make the 216-colour set a little more accessible, a little more visible. I’m not at all religious about sticking with the palette myself, but I still find it handy to know where it is and make conscious individual decisions whether or not to stay browser-safe.JCT Right now I’m working on a project where I am trying to re-create the colours of products as colour swatches on the web. A subtle pastel gradient can look so sharp if done really right. And I tend to think users (with older computers) blame themselves and their computers more than they do site owners, especially after they’ve gotten used to things clearly looking out of kilter.On the other hand, there are still cases where it makes sense to stick to the palette, in page, table and GIF backgrounds, and in text colours, where a palette colour will do fine.

The worse the scenes of death and destruction, the better the copy, and the more space it gets on the front page.Then the journalist becomes a vulture, pecking at the carrion of other people’s misery, seeking ever more gruesome tales to stimulate the palate of jaded editors Of these, Loyd has no shortage. This is what is known in the trade as “getting too close to the story”.The hazard of war reporting is that correspondents increasingly churn out copy they themselves dub “war porn”: bite-size stories of unending horror to titillate suburban readers over tea and toast. He was persuaded to abandon his plan after it was pointed out that there was no guarantee that the dog-killer would be first to use the privy. Loyd swapped a bottle of beer for a hand-grenade – a simple enough exchange at Vitez – with which he planned to booby-trap the dog-killer’s outside toilet.

At times, his fetishisation of killing machines can become wearying, particularly when he writes almost admiringly of a single long-range sniper shot that killed an aid worker.His near-descent into the abyss is best illustrated by the episode in which he plots revenge on a Bosnian Croat who killed a favourite puppy. They had never heard a shot fired in anger but their man was out at the front, pushing the journalistic limit far beyond acceptable risk. That Loyd was, at times, teetering on the edge of insanity and clearly in need of professional help seems not to have occurred to them.As a former soldier in the British Army, Loyd admits to a long fascination with the military. At times he admits that he almost had a death-wish, driving himself ever further into the killing zone, in action with the Bosnian army.The newspaper executives to whom Loyd filed his graphic accounts of horror of course loved it. No wonder this war of killer postmen and insouciant washerwomen was summed up by a British officer as a “Bosnian mind-fuck”.In these often elegantly written pages, Loyd describes at length how his own mind began to get fucked up. His fractured relationship with his father, combined with repeated exposure to scenes of barbarity, drove him to seek refuge in heroin.

As Loyd’s predecessor at Vitez for The Times, I remember a bright spring morning in 1993, watching housewives hang out their washing as a few feet away armed Bosnian Croat militiamen darted from house to house, attacking Muslim troops. Meanwhile, the local postman (nicknamed “Postman Splat”) set up a mortar not far from the British base and loosed off a round whenever he felt like it. This peculiarly squalid conflict witnessed some of the war’s ghastliest atrocities, such as the 1993 massacre of Muslim villagers at Ahmici by Bosnian Croats.
Bosnia then was a bizarre mix of the deadly and the banal. With his ponytail, battered Lada and unrivalled access to the frontlines, Loyd – as a correspondent for The Times – was one of the bravest and most familiar figures covering the Bosnian war. His base was the town of Vitez, site of the British UN headquarters, rather than the capital Sarajevo, and his war the sporadic struggle between the Bosnian Muslims and their sometime allies, the Bosnian Croats. ANTHONY LOYD has had several wars – Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Chechnya – but it was Bosnia that engaged him fully. It left him, like most of the journalists who stalked its shell-scarred moonscapes, spinning in its emotional slipstream Bosnia is the focus of this powerful and moving book.

If you accidentally accept its prompt, it automatically changes that word throughout the text. Still less can I explain how non-existent words such as phose and internat would get into the program. Call me exacting, but I would submit that a computer program that wants to discard a real word in favour of one that does not exist is not ready to be offered for public use.Not only does the system suggest imbecilic alternatives, it positively aches to put them in. For this column, for instance, for Internet it suggested internat (a word that I cannot find in any dictionary, British or American), internode, interknit and underneath.

Fax prompted no fewer than 33 suggested alternatives, including fab, fays, feats, fuzz, feaze, phase and at least two more that are unknown to lexicography; falx and phose. Cyberspace drew a blank, but for cyber it came up with chubbier and scabbier.I have tried without success to discern the logic by which a computer and programmers working in tandem could decide that someone who typed f-a-x- would really have intended to write p-h-a-s-e, or why cyber might suggest chubbier and scabbier, but not, say, watermelon or full-service petrol station, to name two equally random alternatives. Nor does it recognise many plurals or variant forms, such as steps or stepped, or abbreviations or acronyms. Nor, evidently, any word coined since Eisenhower was President. Thus, it recognises sputnik and beatnik, but not Internet, fax, cyberspace or butthead, among others.But the really distinctive feature of my spelling checker – and here is the part that can provide hours of entertainment for anyone who doesn’t have anything approaching a real life – is that it has been programmed to suggest alternatives These are seldom less than memorable.

Actually, since a computer doesn’t understand what words are, it looks for letter clusters that it isn’t familiar with, and here is where the disappointment begins.First, it doesn’t recognise any proper nouns – names of people, places, corporations, and so on – or non-American spellings, such as kerb and colour. When you have done a piece of work, you activate it and it goes through the text looking for words that are misspelled. But this still doesn’t adequately explain the wondrous – the towering – uselessness of my computer’s spelling checker.Like nearly everything else to do with computers, a spelling checker is marvellous in principle. It’s a disastrous combination.When I first read that the computer industry had created a problem for itself so basic, so immense, and so foolish, I suddenly understood why my fax facility and other digital toys are worthless. Meanwhile programmers, can write 80,000 lines of complex code, but fail to note that every hundred years you get a new century.

You know, then, that at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 2000, all the computers in the world will for some reason go through a thought process something like this: “Well, here we are in a new year that ends in “00 I bet it’s 1900, computers haven’t been invented yet Therefore, I don’t exist. Guess I had better shut down and wipe my memory clean.” The estimated cost to put this right is $200 trillion gazillion or some such preposterous sum. A computer you see, can calculate pi to 20,000 places but it can’t work out that time always moves forward. They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match.You will have read about the millennium bug, I am sure. Confronted with anything else, it went into nervous breakdown mode.I also discovered that the electronic address book had a similar quirky aversion to non-American addresses, rendering it useless, and that the answering machine function had a habit of coming on in the middle of conversations.For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.

Recently, we were told John- Paul might have to get his foot amputated I really wanted to do something to make it up to him. I think even if he did blame me, he wouldn’t let on: he hates to see me upset.John-Paul has suffered so much pain and frustration, it’s hard watching it. The only time John-Paul ever showed any anger towards me was in the hospital. He’d get frustrated and talk to me in a different tone to his dad I thought it was because he was blaming me for his pain I’d question him, but he always denied it.

When I stopped, all I could do was think about the accident and that would start me off again.I felt really guilty about the situation, but there was no hostility towards me If people did think it was my fault, they never showed it. In a mad panic, I crashed into a signpost and was knocked out for a few seconds. I came to and thought: “What have I done?” The impact was on John-Paul’s side of the car, and he was bent like a banana. My daughter Gemma had been flipped into the boot and her twin Steven was trapped behind John-Paul. At first I thought John-Paul was dead, I kept crying and saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”. When I heard him scream, I was relieved, but still felt awful, he was in great pain because of me.
I broke my pelvis and had to stay in hospital for three days All I did was cry. Sue

As I started to lose control of the car, I was thinking “Oh my God”.

It hung for a while at the National Portrait Gallery and I had the good fortune of seeing a sketch of it in Paul’s studio, and bought a copy. It has great sentimental value for me: it includes the likes of Yitzak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Isaiah Berlin, President Herzog, and Lord Rothschild. The tone is brown sepia, which gives it a Rembrandt-esque feeling, and it’s a very dramatic painting, with everyone seated at a long table. In fact, you may want to consider unplugging everything before a storm. Four unwitting video-game players were reportedly struck by the bolt that hit their computer’s power source Doom, indeed 2.

Pipes, water, and electrical wiring are the paths of least resistance which lightning will follow. You should be fine inside a car, as long as the ignition is off, the windows are rolled up, and you’re not touching the metal frame.Be careful when wearing metal. Two women in London were killed by a bolt of lightning recently when the wire in one of their bras acted as a conductor.If you’re at home, get off the phone, out of the shower, and away from metal window and door frames. In South Africa last year, one soccer game ended prematurely when six players were jolted out of their sneakers by a single bolt of lightning.If you feel that your hair or clothes have become static, it may mean you’re in the middle of an electrical storm Make a run for the safest place. If you can’t count to 10 before you hear the thunderclap then you are a potential lightning conductor.Get off the playing field Golfers aren’t the only ones at risk. The odds of doing so and surviving and finding someone who will stick with you afterwards are a lot higher.MALES BETWEEN the ages of 10 and 35 constitute 84 per cent of all lightning victims.

Mistakenly thinking they’re perfectly safe, many don’t have the sense to come in from the storm But in fact, you even may be at risk in your own home. Most people think they should count one second for a mile, which gives them a dangerously false reading It’s actually five seconds per mile. Here are some things to consider before your life is ruined in a flash.Carefully count the seconds between the flash and the thunder. We’ve needed to make some big adjustments in our marriage, learn to be patient, and to communicate like most couples never do.”But aside from memory loss, strange photos and a suspicious medical and insurance community, in the end Steve Marshburn may be the luckiest man on the face of the earth The odds of getting struck by lightning are one in 600,000. This is because she has been doing it so long for Steve that “it’s become a habit.”She explains: “I know what he’s thinking and he just can’t get the words out That’s where I step in I know his frustrations, and I do what I can to help We were married for four years when he was hit.

Dr Cooper believes that since numbness is a major symptom of lightning-strike victims, Deal’s case, though extreme, is not implausible. But while never having to worry about winter clothes may sound convenient, Deal’s body is still susceptible to frostbite. And anyway, for Hughie Gallacher the sounds of glory were long gone, and all he could hear was the sound of an oncoming train.. BACK IN THE good old days, when Zeus was the big man in the cosmos and thunderbolts were a godly form of angry e-mail, any Roman struck down by lightning was typically left unburied. He was seen by several people, but he ignored their greetings and kept walking.Finally, he headed up the hill towards the railway track and up on to the little bridge. From there it would have been possible to look across the river and see the huge ramparts of the old St James’s Park stadium, the place where had given and received so much all those years ago.But it was a weekday, and the stadium would have been silent. After posting the letter he began to wander aimlessly through the streets.

Days before his trial, scheduled for 12 June at the local magistrates court, he met a local journalist pal who reported that he looked like a man walking in a dream, glassy-eyed and traumatised.”It’s no good fighting this thing now,” said Hughie “They’ve got me on this one My life is finished. It’s no use fighting when you know you can’t win.” And on the morning of 11 June he scrawled a short note, addressed to the office of the Gateshead Coroner, in which he expressed his regrets at the trouble he had caused, adding that if he had lived to be 100 he would never be able to forgive himself for having hurt Matthew. Later Gallacher apologised, said his son, but by then Matti had probably told some friends of the incident and an unknown neighbour may have telephoned the NSPCC.It wasn’t until the next day, when police and social workers called to take the boy away, that Gallacher realised he was about to be charged with an offence that could mean losing custody of his children. For several weeks, according to his friends, the shattered man spent hours wandering the streets Many people spoke to him during this time. Even players and officials from Newcastle came to see him, offering their support and assuring him that nobody would believe he had done such a thing intentionally. Many offered to give evidence on his behalf.But for a man like Gallacher, bred in a Scottish culture where cruelty to a child is worse than murder, the looming court appearance and the fact that he could not see his son was driving him closer and closer to the edge. When he persisted his father lifted an ashtray, a small plastic dish and threw it across the room in exasperation It struck the boy on the temple and he ran from the house There was no injury, not even a cut.

For a man as depressed as he was, and who was so proud of his achievements, the hints and the innuendoes were more than he could bear. It just destroyed him.” Hughie Junior’s account of the incident in the house, told to him by the alleged victim, Matti, is that Matti had been misbehaving and had been told off by his father several times. But the shame contained in the very accusation of child abuse and neglect was too much for him. He did a variety of jobs, often menial types of things, just to keep the family together And by all accounts it was a comfortable and happy home. What happened was so sudden and stupid and trivial that it should have stayed a domestic affair, but somehow the details got out and the authorities acted out of all proportion. Then the newspapers blew it all up, implying there had been drunkenness and persistent abuse in the house.”People who knew him were convinced that it was all nonsense They knew that he would never harm his lads. The real reason for the tragedy was the death of his wife some years earlier She had a heart complaint and she died suddenly And it seemed that the whole of Hughie’s life was shattered.

Over the following years he became a very depressed and lonely man, but according to his sons he did the very best he could in looking after them.”He hadn’t saved any money from his footballing days, but he was willing to go out and earn a living to keep his family together. Hughie adored his kids and he never laid a hand on any of them. Hughie Junior has now left the Gateshead area, and his whereabouts are unknown, but the story he told Joannou was vastly different from that hinted at in the press reports.”Stories of abuse and neglect inside that family were a complete nonsense,” said Joannou “If anything it was the opposite. And if what he says is true then history and fate dealt a very unfair and savage final blow to Hughie Gallacher.Paul Joannou, a Newcastle-born author and sports historian who now lives in Edinburgh, spent years researching Gallacher’s life and became a friend of Hughie Gallacher Jr, the oldest of his three sons.

Writers have been similarly fixated on the misery of the weather. Explaining why he was first driven to take opium, De Quincey wrote; “It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy London Sunday.” “Our weather is very bad and slobbery,” knew Swift. While the Impressionists celebrated springtime in France, artists working in these isles have mostly painted the fog, the gloom and the nights that begin at three Think of Turner, Whistler or the engravings of Gustave Dore. Artistic representations of Britain have long confirmed the gloomy view of its climate.

IoS readers can purchase the book for the special price of pounds 16.99 (including p&p); to order call 0135 827 750 and quote reference `50 Immortal’. I’VE BEEN sad thinking about how much worse the weather will get before it improves. The last leaves will go, nights will start at three in the afternoon, and the earth will harden so that it’ll be inconceivable that anything ever grew from it – that there were once flowers and kisses and picnics in the meadows. Today, however, people are taking pride in their preserved ancestors again, and the likes of Roberto are seen as an important part of the national heritage. “People are always drawn to preserved human beings,” says Reid, who has just published a book about global mummy culture.

“It is about cheating death.”`In Search of the Immortals: Mummies, Death and the Afterlife’, by Howard Reid is published by Headline, price pounds 18.99. “Having your granddaddy still around was like having a title deed to the family land.”Many Peruvian mummies were destroyed by the conquering Spanish, who, as Christians, found the cult idolatrous. “Ancestors were preserved as go-betweens between the spirit world and the everyday,” says Reid. “While the climate was benign much of the time, periodically there would be disasters like volcanic eruptions, with flooding, landslides and tsunamis El Nino would pass through every 30 years or so. Many believe the mummies were supposed to intercede on behalf of the people in the face of natural disasters.” Mummies were also part of social continuity, he adds.

“The South Americans used the most elaborate mummification techniques ever,” explains Reid. “They would skin the bodies, remove the organs, make stick frames, fill them out with mud and padding, and then put the skin and hair back on.” Some were wrapped in elaborately woven cloth, with gold and jewellery tucked into its folds. The Chiribaya would include scale models to show the trade of the mummified person – perhaps a miniature sea-going raft for a fisherman.South American mummies served several purposes. His elaborate plaits and cap of feathers mark him out as a person of consequence; he died at around the age of 40, about 1,000 years ago.Roberto owes his survival partly to the local environment – extreme aridity and nitrate-rich soil – but also to a sophisticated system of preservation. They were preserving their dead in this way from 7-8,000 years ago, millennia earlier than the Egyptians.
The mummy pictured here was a member of the Chiribaya tribe, and was recently excavated from the Ilo region in southern Peru. Nicknamed Roberto by the archaeologist who excavated him, he is sitting on the side of the road while awaiting transportation to a local museum.

Along with the Berlin Wall, the demise of an intellectual and moral approach to politics – as epitomised by Michael Foot and Tony Benn – is bemoaned. Phillips, while basically in favour of the burgeoning market of popular psychology and self-help books, is concerned about a consequent “devaluation of the language we use to talk about ourselves and each other” through the proliferation of “psychobabble”.”What is `self-esteem’ anyway?” he asks. “Certain words are very powerful – shy, sad, low self-esteem, depressed – and they’re very coercive, they don’t allow people to have their own thoughts. He sees the end of the 20th century as a shrinking world of the imagination. He says “there is nothing deeper than group life”, and his broadly socialist political concerns pepper his books. He is horrified by what he views as an era of “people sitting in dining rooms talking about money”, despite acknowledging that any individual’s chances of optimum mental health are influenced by location or class. She is further sustained by an enviable gift for friendship, of the feline as well as human kind, and what she describes as “the magnificent irrationality of faith”.

Her engaging memoir will delight and tantalise her many admirers.. It would be easy to sneer at Adam Phillips, author and celebrity psychoanalyst. He practises in a book-lined, cobalt-blue Notting Hill consulting room. He thinks big thoughts, writes books either on arcane subjects or on matters accessible but from a highly literary perspective Oh, and he’s rather pretty too.

But how do we end up with such a thing as a celebrity psychoanalyst? And just what is so threatening about ideals these days? If Adam Phillips has committed any crime, it is that he still cares, even if the answers to all the big questions have proved elusive or impossible – or too expensive. The price he has paid for this is a certain kind of fame.
Darwin’s Worms, Phillips’ latest book, is about loss A big concept, for this is loss in the broadest sense. In her reserve and humanity, love of poetry and enjoyment of good food and wine, James resembles her popular hero, Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard. Her 14th novel, A Certain Justice, was published during the course of the memoir, and James gives a riveting account of just what is expected of a bestselling author: a gruelling programme of signing sessions, interviews, and foreign tours.