Whenever I write something a little bit outlandish and possibly technically impossible, life goes and proves me right all along.

Bit of a spoiler here, but in The A-List Family, there is a house collapse caused by the hubristic creating of layers of underground excavating. When I wrote the book, there had been various cases of street sink holes and huge subsidence caused by such work in London. But nothing quite on the scale of what happened yesterday by the River Thames in Barnes. Full story here, but in short the whole of an exquisite Georgian mansion has imploded all for the want of an underground lair.

Icebergs with all their Titanic baggage are so associated in our consciousness with hubris and man’s over-reaching ambitions, that it seemed appropriate to me that it was the name given to the gargantuan houses. There is even a basement conversion company with the tagline ‘what lies beneath…’ which makes me think of dead bodies or other such secrets. It is almost too much of a gift of a metaphor for writers.