‘Buy it you must’Company ‘Weldon, like Dickens, can have her readers perched on the edge of their chairs with excitement by the end of the first page and hold them there in a state of riveted curiosity until the last words. The Sixties background is impeccable and deftly evoked, the style is sharp and the jokes are acidly funny’Evening Standard ‘The carnival of subsidiary characters is an entertaining as in any of Dickens’s novels’Spectator ‘A comedy high-wire act. There is huge skill and discipline beneath the baggy trousers and red nose of a Gran Guignol adventure story. The novel is funny, moves at great pace, and is richly entertaining’The Times