Robert Amiss is asked by Lord Papworth to manage the journal The Wrangler in order to try and streamline things and cut costs. Currently the journal is losing Papworth a great deal of money but he feels a duty to keep it going. Robert soon finds there are savings to be made without upsetting ...
For many years Westonbury Cathedral has been dominated by a clique of High Church gays, so when Norman Cooper, an austere, intolerant, happy-clappy evangelist, is appointed dean, there is shock, outrage and fear.David Elworthy, the gentle and politically innocent new bishop, is distraught at the ...
Robert Amiss, a civil servant, has been seconded to the British Conservation Corporation for a year. He is not happy about it but doesn’t feel he has any choice in the matter and prepares himself for a year of boredom. Gradually he does come to like a few of his staff even the practical joker, ...
"Academia (n.): a profession filled with bad food,knee-jerk liberalism, and murder...Being a member of the House of Lords and Mistress of St Marthas College in Cambridge might seem enough to keep anyone busy, but Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck likes new challenges. When a combination of weddings, work...
Sheer pleasure! Funny, intelligent story of a guy trying to find out what's really going at a school with too many suspicious deaths. Here's my favorite passage, which conveys the tone:"Rich had had a long apprenticeship with the wealthy and had learned the hard way what gave them pleasure. Early...
Robert Amiss allows Ellis Pooley to persuade him to apply for a job as a waiter at a gentlemen’s club to try and find out what is going on there. Was the recent death of the club secretary suicide or murder? It soon becomes clear that certain stalwarts who have taken up permanent residence in t...
The British and Irish governments have chosen Baroness Troutbeck to chair a conference on Anglo-Irish cultural sensitivities. She instantly press-gangs her friend Robert Amiss into becoming a conference organizer. When a delegate plummets off the battlements, no one can decide whether it was by a...
My September TBR outside-the-genre choice was Carnage on the Committee by Ruth Dudley Edwards. It was ultimately greatly disappointing. Darn it. Two comments led me to read the book. The first, a compliment from the Daily Mail: “It’s always a pleasure to welcome another iconoclastic blast against...
Robert Amiss finds himself involved in a murder case – not as a suspect because he couldn’t have murdered the victim – but as a mole helping Superintendent Jim Milton to understand the background to the case. Amiss is a civil servant working in Whitehall and Sir Nicholas, his boss, is murdered. ...
Still feeling slightly nauseous, she picked at a few bits of cheese, but concentrated on the accompanying reasonably decent claret. Having remembered uneasily that she had once held forth to Sarkovsky on the evils of Surf ‘n Turf, the baroness decided that since he seemed to have gone mad, in the...
‘And no playing silly buggers this time. Who’s going first?’ ‘I’m afraid the English are supposed to,’ said Charles Taylor apologetically. ‘Not that I mind. I’d be happy to make my presentation at any stage of the proceedings, but at Robert’s ...
‘She seemed preoccupied. Still trying to think of a way of getting her hands on Robert, perhaps.’ He sneezed. ‘Dreadful pong in here, Ellis. She certainly puts on enough perfume.’‘It’s not just perfume, sir.’ Pooley prided himself on his discriminating sense of smell. ‘It’s the additional smells ...
Martha's 3« ^ » ‘I played a blinder on that one,’ said the Bursar complacently as they conducted their postmortem on the telephone later that evening.‘What about me? I thought I did rather well.’‘Not a bad touch with Oscar Wilde and the stick, but I thought my approach was rather more subtle.’‘Su...
Even though Deptford had told him a few stories of Beesley’s courage and dash on the hunting field, they seemed incompatible with a voice like a neurotic nanny goat and an obsession with trivia. But then, recollecting some senior civil servants for whom he had worked and ministers he had known, A...