Her string of brief marriages and lovers is a life-long pattern that Ms Cohodas attributes to insecurity and to an inability to be alone.

ECONOMIST: Dinah Washington

But the overwhelming long-term factor is the changing pattern of family life.

ECONOMIST: Education: The snowman goeth | The

"We all admire the beaver for the way it can turn a linear river into a lake with a dam, but the termites turning the desert into a pattern of oases that allow permanent life even in drought periods for hundreds of years - that's much more fascinating, " he told BBC News.

BBC: Termites 'engineer fairy circles'

An anthropocentric humanism finds expression in this novel in the very sensual pleasures of life and in the theory of chaos, pictured as a waterwheel with an irregular spin that creates a butterfly-like pattern which is impossible to predict but beautiful to behold.

ECONOMIST: Grief in fiction