Reviewing Angus Wilson's final novel in the New Statesman, David Lodge made the telling reproach that ‘art, in this novel, is so closely associated with hereditary wealth and privilege’ and that ‘the author's delight in high art and high civilisation has led him to be over-indulgent’ to his aristocratic main characters. Margaret Drabble expressed similar concerns in her review of the novel a week earlier when she warned her Listener readers that ‘it is risky, in 1980, to choose a titled family and a great house as one's subject, especially when one's message is essentially democratic’. These reviews speak revealingly of their moment at the end of the post-war settlement. In 1980, high culture and high society should be off-limits to any serious writer because of their old liability to get mixed up in one another.