Before his death in 1993, he had been working on a novel set in Delphi, and narrated by the priestess of Apollo herself, the Pythia. In 1995, Faber published the novel, giving it one of the titles Golding wrote on the manuscript: The Double Tongue.

Golding left other material: his journal, running from 1971 until the night before his death, and amounting to over two million words; reminiscences; unpublished stories, plays, poems; and a large collection of letters from many correspondents. Many of these are being prepared for publication.

All these resources provide opportunities, with their own difficulties and constraints. One major project for the future is Golding's biography, undertaken by his daughter Judy Carver. The problem of the biographer is partly one of selection, but also one of seeing beyond the author's own idea of himself.

The Golding family seldom if ever threw anything away, especially if it had writing on it. The documentary evidence for Golding's life is extraordinarily rich, including his wartime certificates for wounds, boxes of receipts spread over many years, shopping lists, old cheque book stubs. A diary from his adolescence survives. His father prepared him a copy of Caesar, with text, translation and vocabulary: this survives. So does a similar version of Beowulf. Golding himself wrote in copies of books, and often left other documents in them. He started manuscripts, put them aside, and apparently forgot them. He was an enthusiastic photographer, and after 1971 these provide an illustrated commentary on his journal. There are audiotapes, home movies, and over a hundred glass negatives mostly taken by his father, some dating from the nineteenth century. There are photos of Golding in his pram...