The highly praised novelist, columnist for The Spectator, The Oldie, and The Catholic Herald, creator of cookbooks, and Duckworth's fiction editor, Alice Thomas Ellis was both a smoker and a contrarian. Here, writing in 1993, she writes as both. She expresses skepticism about the expertise of doctors some will feel relevant at the moment.
Cat Among the Pigeons collects some of her Catholic Herald columns. Serpent On the Rock reflects sharply on modern Catholicism. Her novels won several awards, The 27th Kingdom being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A trilogy of novels published together as The Summer House was made into a movie. Under her married name Anna Haycraft, she wrote cookbooks. Her autobiography, of sorts, appeared as A Welsh Childhood. One of her best known lines, characteristic, is "There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone". She died in 2005.
