Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.

Most people feel that his first two novels set in a fictionalized South Africa are his best: Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. But even as I (truthfully) denied it a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting when sombrely robed the fellows debated hotly and with manifest ill-will whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based. "I don't want to learn the language" he says.