Out go Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney with all their 18th century frills and fripperies, like aristocrats deported on the tumbril.

Like the macaws, amazon parrots have suffered greatly during the last few centuries and due to human interference the numbers of many species have declined dramatically.

This margin between the real and invented is always arbitrary and blurry. But Welty suggests that it will always be here and that the task of literature is to remind us of it. We need the incredible just as we need the opportunities to differentiate between a story and an unstory.

Poor Neville. He really is a Gryffindor, not a Hufflepuff, although he seems Hufflepuffish at times.