Like many writing types I used to draw and though I am no professional artist, when I wrote my first novel, The Plate Shop, I hoped to combine the text with illustrations (I had studied such combinations in my research on Dickens, Thackeray and their illustrators). Capriciously I reproduce some drawings and sketches done then, and some may find their way into the Holland House reissue of The Plate Shop scheduled for 2019-20.

The four collages illustrating The Subject of a Portrait were intended to reflect the shadow side of the psyche of John Ruskin (the ‘Subject’): the eight other illustrations reproduced in that book were images made by the real John Everett Millais – also a character in the novel. They show his tender humanity while the serpentine shadow-world of Ruskin’s dreams was his own.