Cristina Odone made a splash in the 1990s as one of the media’s favourite It girls, the go-to Catholic commentator, but went on to broaden her range into the new century to write novels and debate politics and society as, first, deputy editor of the New Statesman, and then as a columnist in The Observer and The Daily Telegraph.

But of late, the woman Cardinal Hume once affectionately dubbed “the odd one” during her tenure as editor of the Catholic Herald, has largely kept out of the limelight. Why the absence, I ask … ?