Owed to my wife - Telegraph The value of an estate is a poor guide to a deceased's life: a steady ascent of the property ladder can make a millionaire of almost anyone these days, an achievement that tells us next to nothing about whether our neighbours have led good, bad or even interesting lives. Still, it will be fascinating to pore over the records contained in the England and Wales National Probate Calendar for the years 1858 to 1966, in particular those that deal with the bequests of the famous. Poets, we've come to believe, ought to be penniless, and drunken Dylan Thomas conformed to type, leaving just £100 to his wife; T S Eliot, meanwhile, left the equivalent of £1.6 million. In the end, as poets know better than most, "What survives of us is love" - though Shakespeare, of course, made sure that we would remember his wife Anne in perpetuity by leaving her his "second-best bed."