picture in my mind

Because I miss Lymond, I googled him. :p

I read 600 books doing research for the Lymond Chronicles. And, remember, this was before computers and copy machines. I must have copied out thousands of pages of notes - which I still have, collected in notebooks.
~Dorothy Dunnett

Goodness. What wouldn't any of us give for just a little bit of those notes!

And you know what! Donati = Dunnett in Italian!

The name Donati - as in Evangelista Donati, who looks after Joleta and later hands Kuzum into the care of Philippa at Zakynthos - is apparently the Italian form of Dunnett... So like Dorothy to drop such a connection into the story knowing that it might lay undiscovered for years. I can just hear her laughing - ‘oh good, they found one, but there’s plenty more to go’.

Man! I so want to sit and reread. If I were thrown on a desert island, I'd want the chronicles to be with me.