Over the last few days, former Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell has suggested that George Michael may have been tortured by a childhood secret that proved to be both the singer’s inspiration and his curse.

Michael was, of course, a global superstar, recognised as one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation. A string of bubblegum hits in the Eighties with Wham! made him the bedroom-wall-pin-up for teen girls – and some teen boys – around the world.

And as he outgrew the sockless deck shoes and coiffured highlights and forged a more contemporary image rendered in brooding charcoal and black and punctuated by goatees and designer shades, his songwriting became similarly substantial...

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Rachel Watson, the girl on the train in Paula Hawkins’ searing bestseller published two years ago, is a woman living on the precipice of her own sanity. She stares into the black abyss of total emotional loss on an almost daily basis.

In the novel, Rachel is a functioning alcoholic divorcee who is kept from being engulfed by the hollowness of her own existence only through an irrational preoccupation with the lives of a couple whose house her train passes every day on its way into London.

It is this thread alone that barely tethers her to the here and now and the reality of who she is and what she stands for.

‘I want to drag knives over my skin, just ...

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