David Lodge's extended novella is a delicious contemporary comedy on the perils of celebrity. It concerns a plot for revenge hatched by two writers, Adrian, a distinguished novelist seeking obscurity in a cottage near Gatwick and Sam, a successful scriptwriter who drops in on his old university friend en route to LA. The object of their revenge is one of the new breed of Rottweiler interviewers, a young woman who writes vicious profiles for a paper and who has just published a particularly nasty profile of Sam. Naturally, it all goes completely wrong.