When Michael is, after years of grafting, plotting and scheming, finally appointed editor of a national newspaper, his clever, beautiful wife Nina should be able to relax and enjoy life in their elegant London house; instead, with the discovery that he is having an affair with a ditzy young hackette, her secure, comfortable world begins to break up. Add in a charismatic and, of course, devastatingly handsome young clergyman, a thoroughly disreputable rightwing politician and an out-of-control alcoholic, and you have a readable, if somewhat uninvolving, portrait of the power brokers of pre-millennial Britain.
