Despite the fact that the festive twinkly fairy lights have to fight to get noticed in the glare, and the wilting snowflakes on shop windows have an air of the ridiculous about them, the festive season in South Africa has an extra celebratory edge to it, because this is the time when many businesses shut up shop for the end-of-year holidays, the schools all close and there’s a mass, sunblock encrusted migration to the coast for a few glorious weeks.

The river Thames is the backdrop for much of the action in my latest novel Jam and Roses. Sometimes, in the novel, it is a soothing and benevolent presence, at other times menacing and dangerous. The Thames is a river that seems to belong to the whole world. But it’s also a local river, and as a child, growing up near Tower Bridge in Bermondsey, the Thames for me was a source of fascination, excitement, but also of terror.

Head of Zeus have acquired two new books in the Celcius Daly crime series by Anthony J. Quinn. Nicholas Cheetham, publisher at Head of Zeus, bought UK and Commonwealth and translation rights from Paul Feldstein at The Feldstein Agency.

It’s the beginning of winter: a time to look at trees’ anatomy; to coppice and fell; to plant seedlings before the hard frosts come, and also to admire. But for me this national tree week started with a revelation. I have been pruning an old, outgrown hawthorn hedge and weaving the cut branches between the stems to keep deer out of a new plantation that they have been munching on. I have no idea how I got to the age of fifty-three without ever having been jabbed by one of their barbs, but it must be so. I would have remembered.

Influencing such diverse subjects as International Human Rights law, the speeches of Nelson Mandela and even the title of one of Jay-Z’s hip-hop albums, the Magna Carta is one the most inspirational statements in the history of democracy. Now read an extract from Dan Jones' new book on the Great Charter.

Extract from Magna Carta by Dan Jones: