Harrods looks as if it could be made of gingerbread, anyway, don't you think?

And though it had never struck me before, Christian Dior bore a remarkable resemblance to a gingerbread man. What a brilliant idea to recreate Dior's atelier, his seaside childhood home and his chateau in Provence as an entrancing gingerbread grotto. Free to get in - and when you think that a visit to Father Christmas at Hamleys is a whopping £50, I'm sure lots of little girls would prefer this. Only grown-ups on the morning I went - but it was a schoolday - oohing and aahing at all the tiny Dior gowns. Wouldn't Mrs 'Arris have loved it?

Well, it had us talking all the way home ... mostly about how Mark Rylance came to be in such a tedious teenage gore-fest. Five stars from The Guardian and half a star for the roadtrip scenery from the ladies who thought it would never end.

I didn't realise that this was the third book of a trilogy until I'd finished it, but it's a real page-turner - based on fact - about the precarious lives of the elite in Stalin's Russia.