Rosemary Sutcliff  was a children’s writer and historical novelist who believed in re-incarnation. She told me , as she did other people, that she once found herself telling someone who suggested that perhaps Roman soldiering would be her fate in a future life that “she had already had enough of soldiering”. She believed in it for animals too, including her own. Hence her book  A Little Dog Like You (1987), in which a woman whose beloved small dog has died finds him again when he is reborn in the body of a new puppy.