The narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life... all Samson has to do is to write it as it happens.

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

The adolescent Christopher and his soulmate Toni had sneer at the stifling ennui of Metroland, their cosy patch of suburbia on the Metropolitan line. They long for life to begin - to travel and choose their own clothes. Then Chris starts to settle into bourgeois contentment. Luckily, Toni is still around to challenge such backsliding.

Spins out a multiple mystery of obsession and betrayal (both scholarly and romantic). This book creates an exuberant enquiry into the ways in which art mirrors life and then turns around to shape it.

Charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginnings as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. This novel enables readers to follow her experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China.