Dear Bernard, I’ve always had difficulty in coming up with titles for pieces of work, be it an essay, short story, or a novel. Your titles are always brilliantly simple and make so much sense once you’ve finished the book – of course the first Arthur book is called “The Winter King” because Mordred was born in the winter. Do you find coming up the titles of your books easy? And which do you do first, name the book and then begin writing or come up with a title while writing and the plot begins to take shape?

A second question I wanted to ask is that Pyrlig, Peredur and Ralla are all characters in the Arthur series, and there the same three names appear in the Saxon series. Was this intentional or something you wrote without realising? The connections between Derfel’s world and Uhtred’s world are well known and I was wondering if this was another one. Rhys Wood